• 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.

  • Rise up children and be free

    Illustration from the post “Rise up children and be free”

    How to make yourself very, very unpopular! Years ago I discovered that in the tug of war between the rights of women and the needs of children it can be dangerous to take sides. I gave up writing supportive articles about feminism, since there were already plenty of them, and started to defend the rights of children. It seemed to me then that children’s well – being was in danger of being forgotten in the rush for rights for women in this country.

    To my amazement, the very active feminists around me ostracised me – crossed the road rather than acknowledge me if I met them in the street, and carried on a sustained campaign over the years of hostile letters about me and my articles in the local press. Many years later one of the most prominent and talented of these women, by then a mother herself, wrote a book on mothering in which she vindicated my stand, saying I was the only woman in NZ who had stood up for motherhood.

    I say this as I gear myself up for what could well be an infuriated response to this blog by people who feel passionately about the rights of women. Because now I’m bothered about motherhood. It’s a fact of life that when women become mothers they have to give up lots of rights – the right to a night of unbroken sleep, the right to go to the loo without an audience, the right to have an un-interrupted conversation with a friend… the list of lost freedoms is a long one. But we all know that babies and children must come first.

    So it bothers me to read that women are artificially having babies into their fifties and sixties, or when they don’t have a partner to support them and their child. I know from experience how hard it is to be a single mother, and to try to be both mother and father. And I feel sad for children who lose their elderly mothers to illness or old age before they are even adults. Children are stuck with what sometimes seem to me to be selfish choices and I don’t feel that all women have the right to have a child, if the child’s quality of life is at risk.

    But even worse, is to read that in the US, Canada, Australia and Germany, women are not just being being sent on active service, but now to fight as front line soldiers. An enraged man wrote a blog that this was ridiculous as women were not physically strong enough to do what has to be done in the front line and under fire, he felt that men were being endangered, and he’s probably right.

    But what bothers me is that many women serving now are also mothers, with their husbands also serving. Surely we all know now that parting a baby or a young child from their parents breaks the bonds of trust. Abandonment sets them up for all sorts of emotional problems and relationship difficulties both in childhood and in later life. And most people now too, surely know that this is one of the traumas that propels hurting teenagers into drugs and alcohol dependency, pregnancies and violence, and too often, broken relationships, marriages and unskilled parenting?

    And if the mother is killed on active service – where does this leave the child, growing up feeling that his or her mother chose her career and the thrill of fighting over the commitment of mothering? Do the temporary caregivers love the child, and are they happy to discover that now it’s a lifetime commitment? If it’s elderly grandparents, were they looking forward to a peaceful retirement, or maybe coping with ill health?

    For older children the parting from their mothers is just as traumatic. It more than bothers me to think of a child having to say goodbye to their mother, living with care-givers who may or may not love him or her, and going to school every day, either longing for a letter or text from their mother, or wondering if this is the day they’re going to hear that their mother has been wounded or killed.

    I was six and a half when my mother walked out of my life forever, and I know how it feels for those children. The trauma was so great that I was forty five and on a personal growth course before I could bring myself to mention my mother again. What anger and grief vulnerable, broken-hearted little boys and traumatised little girls will grow up with, feeling rejected by a mother who left them behind. Little boys rarely receive again that tenderness and gentleness that a mother can give her son, and little girls are lucky if they find a loving stepmother who doesn’t prefer her own children.

    We read of worrying numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq committing suicide, and the veterans who come home so deeply traumatized by their experiences that they never recover. Some become violent – thirty per cent of returning British soldiers are involved in violence on their return – others are so deeply depressed that they are unable to work, and unable to sustain their relationships. How will it be for children if their mothers, as well as their fathers, come home in this state? Or so badly wounded that they can’t care for their children?

    I wonder if when the policymakers, finding they were running out of men to send on active service, thought – ah, we can send women, and they will approve because they’ll feel they’re now truly equal, and we’ll get some brownie points – I wonder if they ever thought about the children, and the huge social problems they are cooking up for the future? Have they planned any safeguards for the innocent traumatised children of traumatised parents?

    Did they ever stop to consider that children do have rights, even if they’ve never been spelt out? Though there is no mention of the rights of a child in the Bill of Rights, at least the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says specifically in Article 25 that: “mothers and children are entitled to special care and assistance… and should enjoy… social protection.” Mothers should be exempt from any service which takes them away from their children, or which infringes on the child’s right to be loved and to feel safe. And for this reason, it bothers me that we imprison mothers… the long term damage to children when parted from their mothers is incalculable.

    A boy who’d been adopted at birth, endured a cruel childhood and been returned to the welfare agencies at twelve, bewildered and maimed, was in our car going on an outing, when my little ones began singing a song they’d learned at school, with a haunting tune. The words were “Rise up children and be free… free your brothers, free your sisters, rise up children and be free…” Sing it again, the boy cried, with a catch in his voice. I realised the words felt like hope for him.

    I hope and I wish that mothers could rise up to protect their children, and refuse to be parted from them. Surely all mothers would support them? Yes, women have a voice – but do mothers and children? And is there any good reason why children should be emotionally damaged at home while their mothers are in a foreign country learning how to kill in wars that nobody wants?

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    People are coming tomorrow to inspect the old chap’s collection of Japanese antiques. I’ll have to give them morning coffee and something to nibble. I thought of hot scones, but can’t be bothered juggling with the butter and the strawberry jam and the whipped cream, butter knives and napkins. A cake seems a bit grand, and actually too much trouble for a business encounter, so I’ve decided on flapjacks – nice and chewy, comforting and sustaining.

    Melt six oz of butter and stir in six oz of brown sugar, a pinch of salt and eight oz of rolled oats. Mix them thoroughly and press into a well greased tin. Smooth the mix with a knife and bake for about thirty five minutes in a moderate oven. When cooked and golden brown, cut into squares in the tin, and leave in the tin until quite cold. I like a quite thick flapjack, so they are moist and chewy, so I put this amount in a smallish tin. I often double the amounts, and I usually use half sugar to half golden syrup for a stickier flapjack.

    It’s easy because you don’t have to worry about it rising, and it doesn’t go stale either.

    Food for Thought

    Don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement you can completely change your life.

    Don Miguel Ruiz Mexican teacher and shaman

  • Seize the day!

    Illustration from the post “Seize the day!”

    Today was not one of those days, but One of Those Days. Yesterday, as I watched the tiny, greenery- yallery birds we call silver- eyes in the trees, hunting for insects and the like, I thought how I hadn’t seen the cock pheasant for months. He must have found another home, I thought.

    When I awoke this morning I jumped out of bed and looked out of the open window to the sea as usual. There, right below my window, was the pheasant, in the garden bed with the bromeliads. He slowly pecked and ambled his way down through the vegetable beds to the petanque court, and then sauntereded off down the path into the wild patch. A moment earlier or later, and I would have missed him. Do I believe in coincidences, or did the pheasant pick up my wave-length?

    It was one of those glorious late summer days. The colours bright, the air sparkling. In the morning I rendezvoused with two old friends at an art gallery in the next village, to see an exhibition in a barn in the orchard. The gnarled branches of the old fruit trees were blanketed in fluffy celadon-green lichen, and hung with knobbly green quinces and pink and yellow apples. The barn was full of pottery, paintings, sculpture and furniture.

    Robin knew one of the painters, who told us a dealer had wanted to see her work, so the painter had suggested that the dealer come to the exhibition. The artist led the dealer into the barn, and before she could show off her vividly coloured abstract flower paintings, the poor painter told us with some chagrin, that the dealer had instead pounced on a set of black and brown geometrical abstracts, and said she’d buy the lot. These black and brown works of art were composed of cow dung, clay and other mixtures, and smelt richly of a farm yard!

    After a cup of coffee by the river, and a whip round the gallery there, we drove on to Tawharanui National Park, and the “Exhibition in a Woolshed”. Never has the sea looked so blue, the islands so green and purple, and the sands so white. The rolling hills were burnt gold in the flaming sun, and the gum trees which lined the last stretches of the dusty, winding gravel road gave us grateful dappled shade.

    At the National Park we enjoyed the pungent smell of a real woolshed, and savoured the integrity of the wooden slats and fences, smoothed and polished by the hands of generations of sheep shearers – hands – no doubt, impregnated with oil from the fleeces. Another collection of absorbing paintings, pottery and sculpture, and then a walk around the sculpture park edging the turquoise sea.

    The day flowed from one treat to another. Late in the afternoon we arrived at another cafe for lunch, exhausted with art and walking in the midday sun. We sat outside in the shade of the trees, where we could see the waterfall. We go back through twenty nine years of gruelling growth courses, endless lunches, regular birthday parties, shared experiences and watching our children grow up, marry, have their children, break-up, divorce and struggle on, in sickness and in health…

    Two of the paintings in the woolshed were accompanied by poems by Fernando Pessoa. They were numbered and called “The Keeper of the Sheep”…. my favourite lines from number 11 were: “The world wasn’t made for us to think about it… But to look at it and to be in agreement”.

    And then, number XXX1X: “… the only hidden meanings of things Is that they have no hidden meaning. … things are really what they seem to be And there’s nothing to understand.”

    Words which were a wonderful antidote to artistic pretension and cow dung! As we left the woolshed, outside in the sheep pen there was a battered old farm noticeboard which read:

    ‘Cows: bulls, steers, heifers, calves.’

    Sheep: rams, wethers, ewes, hoggets lambs.’ The names were as evocative as a poem, a hymn to a rural past that few people now remember or experience.

    Sheep seem to be in my consciousness at the moment. Last night, I’d been reading an artist’s account of her decision to find a lamb to photograph while she was painting Jesus, so she’d get it right. She went to a local market, but saw only a sorry collection of scraggly mixed breeds – no lambs. She was about to turn away when a sparkling white ewe emerged from the flock and approached her. She was pregnant.

    The artist decided to buy her, and the dealer told her the sheep’s breed was a ‘mouflon’. On the way home, she was suddenly struck by the fear that the sheep might be some sort of new hybrid which had not existed when Jesus had been on earth, since she had never seen a sheep like her, in spite of growing up on a ranch.

    After establishing the sheep in her new home, the artist set off for the library, where she found that the mouflon was the oldest domesticated breed of sheep in Europe, and had been herded in the Middle East two thousand years ago. Since they were living in the US, it was an amazing synchronicity to find the exact type of sheep she needed, especially since she hadn’t known that she did need it!

    The perfection of the interlocking factors in this story reflect a little of how I feel today. It’s as though I know in my heart, and not just in my mind, that all is well, and that if we let go trying to make the right thing happen, the perfect thing happens. And it may not be what we planned or thought we wanted. This means a sense of peace, a calm, and a certainty. There is no need to keep striving, because when we surrender, life falls into place anyway.

    And I’m learning to let go the distinction between the earthly and the spiritual. There is no distinction. Everything is sacred. So the laughter of today has the same value as this morning’s early meditation. As I hummed the pop song: “Take my heart to higher ground’, a la Streisand, I felt it was as sacred as a Bach cantata. Feeling that every moment has a hidden significance, means the days are lived at a particular level of commitment

    Making the most of each day, and knowing that the sum of these days add up to life well lived, is its own reward, and so in the words of that old Jewish saying, we can go on our way stringing pearls for heaven. And maybe try for heaven on earth… and carpe diem.

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    Browsing through Sally’s latest blog at mybeautifulthings@wordpress.com , I saw her picture of lunch at Falmouth – salmon fishcakes, spinach, poached egg and Hollandaise sauce. My taste buds sizzled, and I thought this is what we’re going to have for supper. I actually had some salmon, plenty of Agria potatoes – best for mashing, and all the trimmings – fresh eggs, spinach in the deep freeze, and a recipe for a quick hollandaise sauce.

    Here’s my recipe for the quick hollandaise sauce. Blend the juice and zest of two lemons, four egg yolks and two teasps of mild mustard. Melt the butter, and keeping the motor running, pour the butter into the eggs in a slow stream. Process until just thickened and no more. Season to taste, and keep at room temperature until using it. This makes two cups. Extravagant and delicious!

    I used fresh smoked salmon and dill in the fish cakes and rolled them in flour before frying them in a mix of butter and oil. I think if I was feeling threadbare, a tin of red salmon, or even pink salmon jazzed up with plenty of herbs would work.

    Food for Thought I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets…

    William James 1842 -1910 Sometimes called the father of American psychology, and also best known for his book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience.’

  • Carrying On With The Army Again (part 4)

    This is the continuing story of ‘my brilliant career’ in the army! I had returned from my regime of prayer and fasting, otherwise known as a Religious Leadership course, none the wiser, but many times lighter from the in-edible food provided along with regular religious services by the Army Chaplain’s Department..

    Back at my all women unit I prepared for my next adventure, and another opportunity to meet the young men we yearned to fall in love with, but never got within coo-ee of. Going on a course was the only opportunity of meeting the opposite sex, so this time I’d sent my name in for a fire fighting course.

    The instructions told me to bring a boiler suit. This did not bode well for a non-athletic person, but I accordingly went to the quarter-master, a grim north countrywoman who’d served all through World War Two, and didn’t approve of frivolous young things like me. Accordingly she issued me with a khaki boiler suit with its outrageous measurements listed on a label stitched to my bottom. It was so huge I had to wear a belt round the middle of my newly skinny frame to keep it up, and was, as I assumed the quartermaster had intended, a perfect antidote to any masculine interest!

    Arriving at the squalid house where a harpy ripped off the army by giving us abominable food and beds, I walked into the ante room, where a group of attractive -looking young men stopped talking and sat in frozen silence, while I wondered what on earth to say or do. Luckily an old boy friend arrived and took me out to dinner (my last decent food for a fortnight), and told me that while he waited for me to go and change, one of these young men addressed the room, and declaimed: “What was that!”

    The next day we all gathered at the Maidstone Fire Station. We began with a long introductory lecture, the gist of which I found hard to follow, as the Chief Fire Officer repeatedly emphasized that there would be no blue jokes and sexual innuendo. Every time these remarks were re-iterated, the various young men stole sideways looks at me, and I sat there completely mystified. But after a few days of lectures, when the practical work began, light dawned. From now on, as we reeled hoses, and ran up and down directing icy water, and manhandled female couplings, man holes, male-female connections and a number of other technical terms, I realised what these kindly firemen had tried to spare me!

    Every day when we staggered back to our digs on freezing foggy December afternoons, I for one, was absolutely shattered with reeling and running and sliding down greasy poles and even climbing out of a tower on what seemed to be a piece of white cotton, and being lowered to the ground. (where my knees gave way from the aftermath of terror, and I fell on them).

    I made sure I was first into the bathroom to warm up with a hot bath, and it was only on the last day, I discovered that the extreme chivalry of my fellow sufferers had caused them to hide from me the fact that that was the only hot bath in the cistern. There was no more hot water until the next morning when I had my early morning bath! On the last day too, the lovely men at the Fire Brigade staged a ceremony at which they gave me their badge mounted on a piece of leather for me to wear as a medal, and said I could come back and join their brigade any time I wanted.

    Back to my nunnery at the depot, I thankfully forgot about fire fighting, and never gave it another thought. Two years later, when I had unexpectedly been made a captain at the early age of twenty two, I was posted with this rank to another all-women unit – the training centre! Did they have something against me at the War Office?

    When I was taking over the job from a much older and rather sporty woman who drove the latest model expensive sports car – a cream TR4 – she pointed out that I would also be taking over as fire officer from her as well. “Did you do that awful course at Maidstone?” she asked in her clipped tones. I nodded, feeling slightly intimidated by this very assured person. “Some bloody Amazon had done it just before me,” she continued, “and I was expected to run around and climb out of towers and generally behave as though I was on an outward bound course.”

    Good heavens, I thought to myself. That must have been me. Didn’t I have to do all those hefty horrendous fire- fighting exercises? No wonder the Maidstone Fire Brigade had taken me to their hearts, given me their badge and offered me a job! My fire fighting duties here at Liphook were not too onerous, and consisted of regularly inspecting the seven rather dim General Duties soldiers, allotted to us to do any heavy work. When lined up for inspection they looked rather like the seven dwarfs. Our fire-fighting equipment consisted of rows of three red – painted galvanised steel fire-buckets filled with sand lined up outside each hut, along with a stirrup pump. Naturally we made sure that the ancient stirrup pumps were in good working order!

    The camp was surrounded by bracken covered heath which often caught fire, and I would hear the Liphook volunteer fire fighters sounding their siren. One night I turned over hearing the siren again, and was just sleepily thinking that it sounded much nearer than usual, when my bedroom door flew open, and there stood my stout colonel, fearsome in riding breeches and a duffle coat flung on over her pyjamas. “That’s Our fire alarm,” she barked!

    To be continued ! Three previous instalments of this account of my brilliant army career are in the archives under: ‘A Soldiers Life is Terrible Hard’ and: ‘Carrying on with the Army.’

    Food for Threadbare Gourmets

    I’ve spent the Easter break knocking up dinners, lunches and morning teas for relays of family and friends who’ve come every day of the holidays. At the beginning of the holiday I baked a fruit cake which would last for the whole holiday, moist and too filling to gobble up.

    It’s simplicity itself. The basic recipe is one pound of mixed fruit, half a pound of butter and a bit less of sugar, three eggs, half a pound of flour, pinch of salt and vanilla. You simmer the fruit in a little water until soft, then add sugar, butter, essence and salt, and when cool add the beaten eggs and the flour. Bake in a medium to slow oven for an hour or until cooked.

    I’ve never made the basic recipe. I add extra fruit, things like chopped dates, finely chopped figs and sometimes prunes, a spoonful of fig and ginger jam or apricot, I use brown sugar, treacle or golden syrup instead of some of the sugar, and sometimes add spices and nutmeg, or orange and lemon juice…ginger marmalade… sometimes ground almonds, or oatmeal or whole meal flour – anything that I think will be delicious! It never tastes the same, but it’s always moist and more-ish. I dredge the top with sugar, so it has a nice crisp sweet top. Simple!

    Food for Thought

    Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song – the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

    Rabindranath Tagore, the very sound of whose name is poetry, is one of my favourite poets. He was a Bengali, and lived from 1861 to 1941