box elder

Lemons

2012-01-28T13:44:00.000+01:00

I've not seen this before here, lemons sold with their stems and leaves on. Large, rather uneven, a little rough and dirty compared with the featureless clones sold in nets, they beguiled me into buying them very easily - they were inexpensive and I needed lemons anyway.

Taking a leaf between your palms and rubbing it rewards you with a scent of lemon peel and petitgrain.

But it's easy to see why they don't often sell them with the stems on; the thorns are quite fierce. They spiked me a couple of times and tore the bag they came in. Unfriendly things, on the whole lemons, thorny and sour to the taste, yet we treasure them anyway.

More frosty stuff

2012-01-24T21:46:00.001+01:00

Ajuga, ivy, Japanese anemone, plantain, chestnut.

I ate a pennywort leaf today. It tasted like a rather musty leafy green leaf from a plant in a wall. I can see why it hasn't become a wild-food must-taste menu item. Or perhaps it has.

The frost seems a long time ago now.

(The photo above reminded me of a Roman tile from the museum of Verulamium at St Albans, near where I grew up. The tile had a two thousand year old dog paw print in it, and a stone which, one imagined, was thrown at the dog two thousand years ago to get it off the wet clay tiles. I haven't searched the website yet to see if it appears there...)

Wall pennywort ...

2012-01-21T21:18:00.000+01:00

... or navelwort.

Turns out this stuff is edible, supposedly with a flavour somewhere between lettuce and mangetout peas, which doesn't sound bad. All this time I've been living surrounded by it and I never knew, Richard Mabey doesn't mention it either. It may be diuretic, however, as many comestible wild plants are. For some reason we got the idea into our heads it was called stone pennywort, which actually sounds prettier, I think, though navelwort is also good and very descriptive of its form, which has always appealed to me as being almost closer to that of a larger-than-life lichen. The tumbling repeating circles of it have a rather art nouveau look, and I think it has been used as a design motif.

Anyway, that's it for a Saturday night post. Off now for my weekly rendez-vous with Clint Eastwood, for whose westerns I have lately conceived an unusual enthusiasm, and the last glass in the bottle.

Through a glass smearily, or otherwise, with an inconsequential glimpse of domestic ordinariness.

2012-01-18T20:56:00.000+01:00

Sitting at the table playing with the camera, trying to find what could be done with different settings. 'Glass envy' my friend called her passion for lenses;

Glass can come in many forms, and I wondered what other glasses one could look through.

Or sometimes inspiration can come from the bottom of a glass, they say. Though I was only drinking tea, from a cup.

This old blue cup is, remarkably, still going. It chips and chips again, and the handle is cracked at the base, so I'm taking a risk using it really, but the stoneware and glaze seem to be so soft and friable that the chips quickly smooth down to a familiar wornness, and as long as no one else uses it they are nothing to worry about, and the cracked handle seems to be holding up all right by friction.

So here is the whole scene.

Foreground:- my very small notebook computer, on which I was trying to find forums and help pages to give me advice on the use of the camera;
- my reading glasses, which I have to take on and off, alternating with distance ones - ah the joys of middle age! - between screen and camera;
- pen pencil and notebook with the intention, rapidly abandoned, of noting which settings I was using for later reference;
- teacup, as aforesaid.

Middle ground: - Tom's reading forelimbs;
-his teacup, which is even older than mine and was a free gift from the Folio Society, which I am, truly, ashamed to admit we were lured into joining at a time Before Internet when English language reading matter was at a premium (unbelievable now, when there are more interesting things to read immediately to hand than can successfully be accomplished in both our remaining lifetimes). The Folio Society entrapped us with introductory offers of good reference books then subsequently forced us to buy those awful pretentiously bound overpriced things which are their raison d'être. Still, Tom got a free mug out of it which is still going;
- salt and pepper, we sometimes try to acquire and get into the habit of using classier s&p sets but always seem to return to a plastic pot and a very scuzzy old pepper mill which still seems to grind better than any other, I don't care for coarse sea salt at the table, it's a foody pretension too far IMHO;
- paper napkins and foil takeaway/freezer containers - paper napkins are the scourge of drawers and cupboards, I've decided, once out of their silly ineffectual cellophane wrappers they scatter and bung up every available space, rendering themselves crumpled and useless in the process. These were waiting to be removed, along with the scores of lidless plastic containers and containerless lids, to to a secondary holding facility, a Curver® storage unit out the back, where their movements will be monitored and contained, or that's the plan;
- the large candle glass, an object which I believe truly fulfils Morris's Golden Rule. The Molés gave it to us years ago and we use it all the time (this is the glass through which the first two pictures are taken, it could probably do with a clean but maybe the smeary bits add interest);
- a yellow cellophane bag of Grenoble walnuts, Tom's current favourite treat and better for him than sweets, plus he gets the exercise of cracking the shells;
- a pink azalea in a pot from B the German Doctor just after Christmas, she said it might grow in the garden afterwards, though I have my doubts, but a flowering plant growing is always nicer than a bunch of cut ones, I think, even if they all wilt and die in the end.

Background: - a tub of glucosamine tablets, a book of 365 sudoku puzzles, and a packet of Victory V lozenges, yes, I know, it sounds like the contents of a Saga Holidays goody bag (that's a thought, since turning my half-century I guess qualify for Saga now...);
- barely visible here but you can see it in the first pictures, a wineglass with a couple of stems of winter flowering honeysuckle and wallflowers, picked for their fragrance, the frost will have nipped the wallflowers now;
- tray with some oddments of fruit, apples and oranges, which as we all know are incomparable, and a Christmas bauble found on the floor after its companions had been packed away on Twelfth Night;
- and beyond that, window on the world outside, also smeary, but irredeemably so, since Tom applied some silicone product to it in the hopes of stopping it leaking in the unremitting prevailing wildness and wet of the weather on the south-west facing front of the house, and we have never been able to clean the stuff off. Baked dry as driftwood in summer, pelted and soaked at most other times, we almost wished we'd kept the horrid old PVC windows and never replaced them with wood. We've remedied the water ingress as best we can (the silicone didn't work, new seals did to a point), now we just mop up and shut up.

What an untidy table we have.

Then I went out and played with the exposure, or was it the shutter speed? Perhaps it was. Or are they one and the same? Anyway, the terrace and garden in ghostly over-exposure, somewhat tweaked, which for some reason I rather like.

So this is the way life goes just now, peaceful, with little of excitement or remark. I wonder if there's really a place for this kind of 'chatty letter' trivial blogging, which rather gives the activity a bad name, and presumes on one's readers' time and patience, but not to worry, there are few rules, or obligations on either side. In truth I tend to think that this is inevitably a time of dormancy, of clearing space and making order, of catching up and conserving and waiting. I've a great yen to read, all over the place, to satisfy curiosity and browse, more than to try to make anything much of my own.

The frost has gone, but there are still some frosty photos to go over, so more of those anon, I guess.

Frosty morning # 2: relief, foxgloves and artichokes

2012-01-16T22:23:00.000+01:00

We've been shrugging and shaking our heads at the mild weather. Fine and warm, everyone agrees, and we thank it for the still full oil tanks and still high wood piles. And yet ... 'C'n'est pas normal...' we could really do with a bit of ice to kill les bestioles, the bugs, the microbes...

On the first crisp bright day of frost, people were out and about with a bright, braced look, greeting one another cheerfully, relieved. Things were more as they should be.

Foxgloves are an abundant weed hereabouts, but largely a tolerated one in our garden. It seems somewhat of a misnomer to call something so massive, fleshy and imposing a weed. They are biennial of course, so their rosettes of leaves keep going through the winter to throw their flowering spikes late the following spring.

Frost does them no harm.

'Nature' sniffed Francois Boucher ' is too green and badly lit'. Funny thing, green, too little and you grow tense and cramped and miserable, yet too much of the same flat, dull tone of it becomes oppressive too. Greenstuff persists plentifully through the year here, but it can grow samey and wearisome, till spring fire sets it luminously alight again in the trees and hedges.

So frost is welcome, for the relief, the picking out of line and form and texture which it provides, and for its muting and shading of dully even colour (and why not give it a hand here and there and click the B/W button?)

Artichokes are biennials too.

These plants we brought back from our B&B friends at Morlaix last year. We like artichokes, though in season they're ever so cheap here, they're still worth growing, as the foxgloves are worth sparing, for their substantial beauty, with their Arts and Crafts foliage and heraldic, Fibonacci-structured flower heads, whether you eat the latter or not.

More frost today, more frosted things tomorrow, perhaps.

Frosty morning # 1: birds

2012-01-15T23:07:00.002+01:00

At last, proper winter mornings, with frost, and the camera is happier.

In truth, I was seriously chasing a second hand Canon like I used to have. It seemed to me, looking back, that I could never quite recapture the kind of shallow depth of field, contre jour, shots I got with it, and though the zoom on the Panasonic is great, and the extra megapixels enable plenty of cropping potential, the speed on auto left a lot to be desired, the shots were less sharp and dynamic, the macro never seems to quite cut it... I just felt fings weren't what they used to be.

So I started mooching about on E-bay, and learned a bit about how that works, which might well be useful life skill in parsimonious times to come, if we actually had anything worth selling. One of the things I learned quickly is that what looks like a marvellous bargain is just a hook, and despite their being very old models, Canon Powershots like I had are apparently still quite sought-after, which at least seems to substantiate my view about the camera.

In the end, I can't justify collecting another, older camera that might break down at any time (after all my old one did) just out of nostalgia, when I have a perfectly adequate one, and that I really ought to find out more about the that and what can be done with it.

I've concluded that nothing much can be done about the depth of field. I reluctantly applied my far from mathematically or optically gifted mind to the question of apertures and DoF. It's no wonder I'm confused. Shallower DoF - ie the area, field, of the photo in clear focus is small, hence those nice sharply stand-out objects with the blurry back- and closer foregrounds which just popped out 'naturally' with the old camera on auto when I held it at the right angle to the light - requires a larger aperture. However, a larger aperture is defined by a smaller number, so a 2.4 aperture is larger than a 8.0 one. This has some bearing on the shutter speed which I've not yet quite worked out and everything is further confused by the apparent fact that many of the nerdy photo people on the forums, Flickr groups etc are no clearer than I am and frequently refer to 'more depth of field' when what they really mean is shallower depth of field.

Then I was further exercised by the mechanics of the Panasonic, with continual references to its 'joystick'. I finally grasped that this was the little wiggly menu button I'd never taken much notice of, and eventually sussed how to apply it to changing the aperture size. Only to find that it enabled no greater range in this than the auto managed on its own anyway, which isn't much.

However, I was encouraged to try the outdoor sports setting for birds and other fleeting things, which the Intelligent Auto often isn't very intelligent about, and the couple of whiz-and-click actions this requires are certainly worth making.

The frosty weather brought the birds in close to the house again. We must have saved a fair bit of money on fat balls and sunflower seeds with this mild winter, we seemed to be buying then hand over fist the last couple of years. But we have plenty in stock,

for the small flock of greenfinches,

and the blue tits which appeared and waited expectantly by the empty feeding area.

I almost ditched the above blue tit shot as he (or she) was turning away, until I noticed that he was caught sharply in mid-poo, which I feel confirms the effectiveness of the speed of the setting for wildlife action shots.

So I'm staying with what I've got, self-indulgent and whimsical spending and the collection of more really quite unnecessary stuff isn't on the cards just now, or ever. I need to get on with taking and editing more pictures rather than midering about how they aren't as good as they might be if only... I might see what I can do with Tom's old titchy Nikon compact for macro shots, which compacts are often quite good for, and perhaps get back to Photoshop and the blur tool for faking shallow DoF. And they do say some interesting macro effects can be achieved with a magnifying glass in front of the lens. A new set of rechargeable batteries for the compact and a magnifier will come in a lot cheaper than a secondhand Powershot.

Some further experimental and plenty more frosty shots to come. Hooray for cold and frosty mornings.

Peaches

2012-01-13T10:29:00.001+01:00

OK, it's another food post, but just a quick one. Essentially a large tin of peaches, with the stones in to boot. But what a difference a jar makes, so that they become golden, luminous globes of voluptuous loveliness. I bought them for their beauty as they were reduced after Christmas; I'm not even sure I like tinned peaches all that much, though when we were kids we thought them a sublime treat, so maybe they'll bring about a Proustian moment. They don't have to be eaten till 2016 anyway.

Flowery desserts

2012-01-11T22:42:00.001+01:00

Noma's 'Dessert of Flowers' has been haunting me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it; perhaps it's something to do with craving for the spring. Though it feels as though spring is prematurely with us anyway - all kinds of things are putting out diffident flowers, there is alkanet blooming and I even saw a bramble blossom today.

I lifted the photo above from Julochka at The Domestic Sensualist, who presumably lifted it out of the book. (It's well worth visiting Ditte Isager's website though, for more of his photography - yes, OK, some of it is somewhat horrible lifestyle-porn, but much is also gorgeous and sumptuous and painterly; especially his photos based around food, like that for the Noma book, or the stuff for Copenhagen Food, or the page called French feast, or any of the things in the Meals section...)

The flower dessert is quite simple as Noma recipes go, no liquid nitrogen, refractometers or musk oxen involved, only two types of sorbet made from skyr and involving acetate film and pacojets but we can get round that. Oh, and teeny-tiny pink meringues hand piped and made with pickled rosehips. and something called 'thyme fluid gel' which involves agar-agar. But I think I've twigged (qv) that the idea is not that you try any of this at home, it's rather about an idea. The idea being translated for me into a longing to eat fairy food. So I made my own much simplified version, using what I could find in the garden and hedgerows in a mild dank January in Brittany. Oh, and in the fridge, freezer and cupboard as well, for the dairy and sugar-based bits.

I'm afraid I didn't stop to photograph it, on account of how the ice cream was melting. Instead I drew it from memory afterwards. It's an awful, infantile drawing, and the crinkly bits are because I had no fixative so wrapped it in plastic to avoid getting bits of pastel crayon on the scanner, but it will serve as a diagram, to which end I have numbered its parts.

I used:

a small scoop of vanilla ice cream
a scoop of very ordinary cheap plain yoghurt. I did follow a tip of theirs and strained it - no need to use muslin, just a nylon sieve and stand it over a bowl for ten minutes. It makes it much softer, thicker and less acid, and the whey you collect is oddly pleasant to drink, or could probably be used for something else.
some little meringues bought from a shop in a packet with Christmas in mind and forgotten about in the cupboard.
rose hip syrup (or gel, if you will). There are some hard rose hips on a shrub rose in the garden. I pared off some of the outside flesh and cooked it in a syrup - I used some quince syrup I made earlier but apple juice, concentrated or otherwise, would be good too - then I threw the whole hips in, but was careful not to let the itchy powder stuff loose. The shreds of rose hip flesh never softened (if they'd been rugosa hips at another time of year they would have, and the pulp could have been used, but these are evidently winter hardy ones and tougher characters), so I squeezed the nearly caramelised syrup through a bit of kitchen muslin. It really looked, and tasted, quite a bit like Delrosa syrup (remember that?), and was quite strongly flavoured from just a handful of hips. Rose hips are an interesting balance of rosy fragrance and apply fruitiness, I always think.
Sweet sorrel sauce. Years go by and wild sorrel is such a ubiquitous commonplace on the roadsides here that I ignore and despise it as food (and it doesn't do to eat too much of it because of the high oxalic acid content), then occasionally I enjoy rediscovering it. Usually I add it to soup or make it into sauce for fish, but this time I wondered about using it as a sweet flavour, after all, it is not unlike tart apples and plum skins in taste. Here it's blended in with sugar syrup and swirled with some single cream, and very zingy it was. The problem I've never been able to get round is stopping it turning a muddy olive colour (and it's such a lovely emerald when it's fresh too) but it didn't look too bad with the other things. Both flavour and look were lifted with the addition of
fennel, which keeps splitting fractally into smaller and smaller dainty feathery sprigs. A little aniseed taste goes a long way, for me, but was just a little, and it did look pretty.
Now the flower bit. In the garden I was able to find a very fragrant white double petalled Winchester Cathedral rose, a carmine red floribunda with no perfume at all, but in bud and very crisp textured, and a few small single pale pink ones, name unknown. Mixed up and sprinkled over the plate. In addition I managed to find a very few
scented geranium buds (the geraniums are still flourishing in the outside beds) and
some rosemary buds and flowers. These gave a surprisingly woody, aromatic flavour, which nicely offset the general delicate sweetness of the dish.

I sprinkled the last two flowers on the yoghurt, and also some scented geranium leaf sugar. I've made this for a long time: you keep a few leaves in a jar of sugar, as with a vanilla pod, and the oils seep into it. I'm experimenting with other more unusual flavourings, like rosemary, lemon thyme, and maybe bay leaves, and seeing what they go with.

So there we are, and it really was a delicious symphony of flavour and perfume, despite the sparseness of the floral bits. I know what you must be thinking, this woman clearly has too much time on her hands, not only to fiddle-fart around making something like this but also to draw it and blog about it in exhaustive detail afterwards. It makes pressing flowers look quite serious and worthy (though you can't eat pressed flowers, so to my mind that's a step down). But what is this world if full of care we have no time to fanny about doing something totally playful and pointless? I actually collected and put the elements together over a few days, while doing more virtuous and necessary things like walking the dog, clearing out the kitchen cupboards and making proper food.

Now I've got my eye on the primroses, dog violets and mimosa that are coming along...

Winter woods: beech, spruce, chestnut.

2012-01-09T22:48:00.000+01:00

Occasionally, some sunlight fell upon the path, which was ... scattered with the mysterious dried-up fruits of various trees fashioned into little brown toys and emblems, which crackled pleasantly underfoot.

(Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice -
Can't say I remember a huge amount about this novel, except it's based in part on the somewhat unlikely premise that someone on LSD would throw himself out of a window in the belief that he could fly. But the little crackling toys and emblems on the forest floor have always stayed with me).

There's so little for the camera to play with at this grey-green-brown time of year, though the light can be good when it shows itself. Despite mounds and layers of gently majestic cloud, and flocks of larks and lapwings (fewer of these than other years), I tend to keep my eyes down, looking at sepia shapes of leaves and husks, livid, waxy discs and domes of late fungi, thick bunches of emerald sorrel. There have been no frosts to speak of, though; flakes of gold and bronze leaves still hover on the trees, and fuchsias and roses keep on flowering in the garden, along with the hellebores opening and the daffodils coming up.

Old things, still lovely, linger, new ones emerge beside them. The light lengthens.

Bowing out

2012-01-06T22:06:00.001+01:00

I don't want to be a party pooper or anything, and I know I've been doing it for less than a week, but I think I'm going to bow out of the small stones thing, at least for the time being. It's a fantastic idea and I've enjoyed giving it a go, but I just don't quite feel I've got the hang of it, can't seem to be able to hit my stride with it. It's feeling like a bit of a chore, and I can't help running off into narrative and anecdote and context, which is missing the point, but because I'm trying to be concise and pared down there's not enough narrative and anecdote and context and so the things seem a bit pointless and baffling sometimes - like what was the pun the woman in the post office made? Well as it was in French it would take a load of explaining which I'd probably cock up and it would be still be completely unfunny anyway because French puns are unless you're French. It was something to do with the pen on the counter having a 'une mauvaise mine' which means it not looking well, but also its mine ie its lead (the bit that writes) is bad, which it was because it wasn't sticking out enough... oh forget it.

Then I feel obliged to do a load of expanding and explaining in the comments which again seems to be rather defeating the purpose.

Also I'm kind of missing doing more structured and extensive things with photos; my one-a-day on Flickr feels unsatisfactory, I prefer to group and sequence them really, and on the whole I just feel that my on-line activity is rather desultory and bitty. (That's 'bitty' in the British-English sense of fragmented and lacking in form, focus and gestalt quality, not the American one of 'small'. To twig means to catch on, to grasp, to 'get' an idea or joke or meaning. I read a rather good line in a novel recently where a Brit character points out to an American that we have to translate for you but don't require you to do it for us, and by and large I believe this might be true. Opinions? You see, you can't do shameless fishing like this with small stones...)

Anyway, there are quite literally, I imagine, thousands of people collecting and producing the most exquisite small stones this month, so I really don't think I'll be missed. As whoever the anonymous person was said, and as this post demonstrates, I probably am better suited to random and intermittent outpourings, at least for now. Mindfulness will have to wait, or be sought elsewhere. I like to take a Three Beautiful Things cure now and then, but that's perhaps about my limit for being concise and disciplined. And I've done quite a bit of daily blogging on and off over the last few months, so perhaps I'm just not in the mood!

Please forgive and bear with this rather tetchy and far from small and beautifully polished offering. Normal, that is random, digressive, usually illustrated, service will be resumed shortly!

Girlish

2012-01-05T21:54:00.000+01:00

The normally dopey and glum post office clerk is acting quite girlish and lively with a pleasant Englishman ahead of me, who has good French but needs help with something technical. She makes a pun about the desktop pen, which I'm not sure he quite gets, I don't. She repeats it to me after, giggling, and I finally twig.

Driving to the airport

2012-01-04T22:58:00.000+01:00

Moving fast, looking down from the dual carriageway in a the late grey afternoon; a tall woman - leather jacket, jeans - walks a big dog on an a pale track between wide, empty fields.

Hand

2012-01-03T23:14:00.000+01:00

A yoga exercise involves holding my wrist with one had and making a fist of the other and rotating it. My hand becomes an alien, ugly thing, the head of something monstrous, reddening because I am clasping too hard in my discomfort with it.

Blaze

2012-01-02T21:54:00.000+01:00

There is a pillar of light at the top of the hill, it scorches the retina in a blazing vertical streak. A change of perspective and it says Cédez le Passage - Give Way.

Bray

2012-01-01T21:11:00.001+01:00

The donkey braying several fields away pins my attention to the moment as the peg pins the clothes, damp and cold between my fingers, to the washing line.

(First small stone. I've not been sure what to do about photos while I'm doing this. It seems to me rather to be against the spirit of it: if the photo is linked to the small stone, serving as an illustration and/or a prompt, it's getting away from the aim of conciseness and immediacy of the writing, rather like drawing from a photo, but if I post photos that aren't related to the writing, it's also digressing and a distraction, and perhaps just a bit too much. However, I shall miss posting photos for a whole month, although I have been drifting away from taking as many.

The solution I've arrived at is to resurrect my long dormant Flickr account and commit myself to posting one photo a day there, which will get me thinking and observing photographically also, but in a different location. Then at the end of each week I'll make a collage of them and post them here. Hope that all makes sense!

OK, that's all; small stones only from now on, no other writing.)

We'll all have some figgy pickle...

2011-12-31T21:32:00.000+01:00

Remember the green figs I scrumped from the car park in Lamballe? Well, it seems these little end of year hangers-on on fig trees in these latitudes are considered pretty worthless, an atavistic remnant of the second fruiting they enjoy in sunnier climes, and really they should be stripped from the tree for its health and discarded. And indeed, unlike those I picked a month or so ago, they didn't show any signs of ripening indoors, but started to become dry, pithy and unattractive, an d none of us wants to end up like that, do we? Though I suppose dry and pithy are OK.

And yet I couldn't quite bring myself to give up on them, and looked up 'unripe figs' on Google to see what could be done. I found a rather interesting Turkish lady's food blog with a recipe for something called 'unripe fig jam' but which is more like candied fruit really. I ended up not following it exactly as it's really just made with a straight syrup, but rather making a sweet pickling syrup with vinegar and herbs and a pinch of salt, but I did take her advice about boiling them twice and squeezing them, though obviously the ones she uses are really green early season large figs, which clearly have quite a lot of nasty sap to be got rid of, but still it seemed useful.

While they were boiling, they really smelled very good, with that delicate vanilla-ish aroma typical of the fruit. Then I made up the vinegar syrup and added them to that, so they bubbled away, with some thyme and sticks of fennel. Our bronze fennel in the tubs in the garden has decided it's time to start throwing shoots again, since winter isn't showing up and it's been mild and wet, and I've been enjoying using it again.

I added some lemon juice and zest too. I do like the word 'zest'.

Then I poured a glass of mead, or chouchen as it is known here. We have very local beekeepers who make a good one, but this bottle was made by the Breton brewers Lancelot, who make excellent beer, and we bought it back in the summer when we visited the Scrap-merchant Poet's Universe. It had a seal of beeswax instead of a foil capsule.

I blanched more herbs: sprigs of thyme and fennel and a bay leaf and added them to the fruit in the jar,

but it wasn't quite enough to fill a half litre Parfait jar, so I made up some more syrup and poached some walnuts in it,

which rounded it off. I imagine eating it in a month or two with goats cheese, perhaps, or some other fairly creamy cheese, or maybe dry ham.

Then it was time to clean the cooker.

I'm aware that most New Year's Eves I come up with something more of a meditation on the moment, and hopefully more inspired than a run-of-the-mill kitchen post like this. But inspiration seems to have deserted me in that form. And yet making something bright and piquant out of nothing seems quite important just now too, for I have a kind of sense of quiet excitement and elusive expectation about things to come, that just around the corner, winking in and out of the corner of my eye, there's a whole new way of seeing, of being, that's as plain as the nose on your face and as clear as day, but also mysterious and oblique and beyond a veil. This delicious, joyful anticipation seems to be able to co-exist, or at least readily take the place of, moments of apprehension, pessimism, resignation and stoicism which is a near-sibling to despair. And I seem to perceive this in others too (though it may be because always tends to see one's own state reflected elsewhere), as when a friend writes

Each moment might be a moment of revelation, but most are not. Epiphanies. The sense of things being hidden rather than revealed, as if they were presents with almost recognisable shapes, wrapped in enticing paper. But you can't quite recognise them, and you can't unwrap them - tantalising, out of reach.
(Fire Bird)

Or another, with a playful image

The joy of sidelong glances, weird and unexpected apparitions, things we never even thought of looking for: for this I wish, for all of us in 2012
(Jean)

Or another, in a series of 11 things, wise words all, posits that

Instability is a part of life...
Circumstances are always changing. You're changing. Life is fragile. Living involves a series of adjustments, sometimes minute, other times huge and staggering.
(HKatz)

The making of things, the intensifying of pleasure in tasting and smelling and hearing and seeing, so that less can be more and there's no need to be greedy or demanding, is perhaps something that needs to be looked out for and honoured, even if it doesn't always succeed, and pickled figs are really rather horrid and not such a good idea after all, there was joy in the doing!

Happy New Year.

A Christmas treat I've been meaning to share...

2011-12-28T19:38:00.002+01:00

This time last year I was sent a link to a beautiful, charming video made by Li Yi and Colin, who are friends of my niece, the other significant Tom in my life (she is in full Tamsin but has been Tom since she was a little thing). This year they e-mailed me themselves with a new one they've made which I think is just as delightful, and perhaps even cleverer with more detail. They really should be winning prizes for these. I understand they're getting married in the coming year so it's congratulations all round to them. Thanks Colin and Li Yi!

Christmas Day

2011-12-25T19:21:00.002+01:00

Well, I've done my bit so far, which is the Brussels sprouts, though Tom started these while I was in the shower, so at one point I was standing in said shower while he stood in the pool of water I am incapable of not making holding out a Brussels sprout and asking exactly to what extent this wee brassica needed to be undressed. I noticed, strangely perhaps for the first time, that Brussels have a kind of fractal growth habit: emerging as they do from a central stem, when you start to take the outer leaves off one, there are tiny, embryonic sprouts already forming on its own central stem. Brussels sprouts have smaller sprouts upon their stems beside'em...

My other duties involve putting the Christmas pudding to steam in the slow cooker (hope this works), functioning as sous-chef and lab technician ('I need a measuring cylinder...' was one instant this morning, I kid you not. But I can forgive this in the knowledge that I live with a man who for a brief time worked under Jacob Bronowsky), and mixing and drinking generous quantities of fizzy cherry kir.

I have not yet had much opportunity to sink myself in Noma, Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, which Father Christmas brought me, a book so beautiful and so preposterous it makes your eyes water, mad Nordic food. Something about it takes me back to the copy of All in French (can't find anything on-line so far about this book, perhaps I'll have to post about it sometime) that appeared under the Christmas tree when I was five, or Emil Schulthess' Africa, that did likewise when I was nine ( I still have both of them). Books which are vivid and awesome and so huge you can hardly lift them, their bindings heavy and solid and formidable, and containing words and images of worlds beyond the imagination, which one day I might transcend to an acquaintance with, or perhaps not. I can't yet decide whether the Noma thing is decadent, bizarre, precious and deeply ironic, or whether it is art in its highest and as yet not fully-grasped form, with something profound to say about our end-time state, our relationship with nature, land, time, place, beauty and one another, of how we came to and continue to be human, or whether perhaps it is both. I don't even know whether it's really got much to do with food as we generally understand it. I just know that when I knew about the book I had to get my hands on it for the photos alone, and once I did I almost shook with excitement, as I did all those years ago with All in French and Africa. So far I can tell you that old-fashioned, pale, elegant cloth binding draws black cocker spaniel hairs as the sparks fly upwards. I might get around to finding more to say later.

Anyway, here is a wee snipper-snapper collage of stuff around the idolatry of hearth and home, as befits the season.

Straw decorations, figs and rosemary (the former foraged from a tree near a car-park in Lamballe. They are small and green, but the last ones I picked ripened quite well inside), holly from real wild trees, cards, walnuts and poinsettia. Plenty of red, which is good for the heart at this time, I find.

And as promised, a stocking full of small stones. No clear rules about what's small enough, three lines maximum seems about right. One or two I collected earlier in the year, kept in a drawer, sort of.

An abandoned pumpkin in the long wet grass of a potager, its pale, collapsing state and decaying cavities are much more eerie than any Halloween Jack 'o' Lanterns.

The wind's eyelid of a white shutter batted against the sunlight.

The walls are flaking and saltpetered, shaded with mould. I work my way around them clearing cobwebs and dead woodlice, and throwing old bits of disused living into bin bags, washing and saving others, burning some.

Viscous raindrops slick on the paving slabs, a headlight from across the road lights the top branches of the sycamore like white paint.

I spill ink then coffee. The boys deal with it sympathetically and competently with lots of kitchen roll.

She tells me about Wittgenstein and Claude Simon, and then the new television her son has just bought them, to replace the very old broken one. 'It's absolutely beautiful! I've been watching Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman.'

Five red bowls, five white ones, in two stacks of alternating colours, one predominantly red, one white.

The morning is measured out in small clipped chunks of time. There are ten tumble-dryer minutes free for coffee, a small white cup, roasted on the premises, they say, enjoyed alone with an almond covered in powdery chocolate.

He announces an extra something, despite her protests, and comes in with two mauve plates and a stollen cake he has found in town to eat with our tea.

The sausages are really rather Rabelaisian, hard and meaty and pungent and mis-shapen. I buy four different flavours, including a Christmas' one, then buy slabs of salty, aged Swiss cheese. It's Christmas, and market traders work so hard, get up so early.

The thick murmuration of starlings is coming from the monkey puzzle tree behind the square. To the right a blackbird is singing. Mild.

At first I feel resentful of the phone call's intrusion, but then I relax and listen to her envisioning of a life of variety and purpose, far away from here.

These straw angels, stars, bells and baubles, strung with red cotton glow and cheer, delicate and without a shred or speck of plastic. Yet I feel worried and compomised by them, they could only have been made by small fingers in factories far away.

Getting on the downward travelator from the supermarket's upstairs car park, the trolley's wheels lock fast, so you are carried passively, no one can pass, and the wall opposite is an expanse of featureless matt anthracite. It is a moment of complete repose amid the noise and bustle.

Both sister and brother call to pick my brains, about chestnuts for stuffing and health insurance. And maybe other things.

I'll try to visit y'all in the next few days. Once again, happy Christmas.

Christmas Eve

2011-12-24T22:42:00.001+01:00

So I just sent out the last e-mail Christmas 'cards', half a dozen or so to those we reckon might not see a virtual one as unacceptable insouciance or cheap-skating or who never send us a card anyway. I used one of today's photos, added text and made a coloured background, then set about personalising and adapting them, only to find that, having sent one in French to a French friend, I had erased the text I'd sent to her but forgotten to change Lucy et Tom to 'Lucy and Tom' in all the subsequent ones to anglophone recipients. An ampersand would have been a better idea. What bothers me about this is not that I have exposed myself as absent-minded and inept, or even a copy-and-paste correspondent, but that it might conceivably look as though I was attempting some kind of pretentious affected Franglais to prove how jolly cosmopolitan I am and how effortlessly I move between languages etc which is a thing I can't abide and which reflects no kind of truth about the situation. So if you got one, my apologies and please take it from me it's the ineptitude option.

I like to get a post done to wish you all well on Christmas Eve, but often find I've run out of steam somewhat by the time I get here. In fact I have been filling a stocking with small stones over the last week or two, to get in practice and also to have something to hang up here tonight if all else failed. But then Mol and I went for a walk and took some pictures leaving Tom to play with chicken stock in the kitchen, so you can perhaps have the stocking tomorrow morning, and look at some landscape for now.

We seem to have had all kinds of weather lately, most of it dreary, though none of it intemperate, so a day of sun in and out of the house was most welcome. As you can see, there are still flashes and sheens of gold to be seen in the countryside, and we have all manner of confused spring and summer flowers still blooming in fits and starts. As a friend said the other day, it seems as if it will go from autumn to spring with nothing in between this time. But I wouldn't be sure, it can still have something up its sleeve, no doubt, and I do feel we need a touch of ice for our health's sake.

Mol has been going a bit short of exercise one way and another, the last time we tried to walk it was cold and she suddenly went all poorly and pathetic, holding up her paw and wouldn't walk any further, though she was chirpy enough when she got home, after being carried much of the way, hmm. Then the other morning she got up and seemed to be afflicted with cramp, squealed horribly for a few moments, limped downstairs, then by the time she came in from the garden she was fine again - none of this looked as though it was ear-related, but seemed to be around her forequarters.

So it's time for her to wear her neck-warmer! This is an old one of mine, a bit small for me but fine for her, and rather a fetching colour on her, we think. She wears it happily and walked very well for an hour today.

We came home in time for tea and the last of the mince pies and Nine Lessons and Carols on Radio 4. A nice one, I hadn't heard 'The First Tree in the Greenwood' for a long time. We pottered in the kitchen for a while - I'm very appreciative that the level of busy-ness I experience at Christmas is largely of my own choosing, as much or as little as I wish, and I enjoy it. We considered the telly but decided to skip it, anything we might have watched we'd either seen before or it wasn't that compelling, and then Tom surprised and pleased me by putting on The Messiah, which is still going. Just us tomorrow and Boxing Day, dinner with friends the next day, then dear step-daughter is coming over, on her own and just for a couple of days at the beginning of the New Year, which was another lovely surprise. 'Step-daughter' always sounds very inappropriate in terms of our relationship for all sorts of reasons, yet I find I now want a way of placing her which involves 'my' rather than referring to as her 'Tom's daughter' all the time. I hope, of course, that she is my friend, but that doesn't explain how we came to be here. I have an inclination to say 'daughter-in-law', and in French of course the distinction would not be made, but then, while she would be the rather nice-sounding belle-fille I would be a belle-mère which brings us back to Snow White, Cinderella et al.

Well now Mister Händel is just winding up with the big Amen, and it only remains for me to wish you all the very best of the season and the holiday, whatever it means and brings to you, and a fond goodnight.

Logs, shoots, cards, stones...

2011-12-18T22:54:00.001+01:00

The amount of wood due for the rental of the field, which has always been rather a moot amount, plus a cord we paid for. A cord also seems a moot amount, as we always understood it's three cubic metres, but in fact it turns out it should be a little more than that, strictly it doesn't exist in this metric country, and who gets out the tape measure when the wood tractor arrives anyway? Whatever, it seemed like a lot when it came to stacking it, not that we're complaining, a well-stocked woodpile gives the same sense of riches, security and comfort that I imagine squirrels get when they make a good stash of filberts, only we're not likely to forget where we put the woodpile or to have it all eaten by field voles. Dropped in front of the house mid-afternoon on Wednesday, we ferried it round to the back and stacked it there until rain, darkness and exhaustion defeated us, but we got it all under cover anyway. We've been thrifty with the fire until now, which with the mild and sunny autumn we've had hasn't been a hardship really, but now we feel we can be generous with ourselves for a bit.

More evidence of the mild autumn and early winter, the narcissus bulbs poking their noses up to see what's going on.

Christmas cards. Oh I've moaned and cogitated about this plenty before, then last year I made really quite nice cards, then this year even though I should have been less busy I didn't really get properly organised with them, and there isn't really the possibility here of just nipping out to the charity shop and picking up a couple of packets. So I ended up doodling some stuff with pastels ans scanning them. This coincided with the arrival of a new Canon printer.

We got this because the old Dell one which came with the last computer seemed to have compatibilty issues with Windows 7. As it turned out these could have been resolved by wiggling through the preferences dialogue boxes and finding 'fit to page'. Still, the print quality even for black and white was becoming dreadful and there didn't seem to be an evident way to service it, and I was fed up with having to send away for exorbitantly priced ink in obscure cartridges which couldn't be flogged back for recycling. The print quality on the Canon one is very good, and the cartridges are cheaper and available from the supermarket.

So, the doodles. Not too keen to put my name on them really - the holly's all right but the baubles look like nothing so much as radishes and turnips.
I made some from the contact sheet and lots of fiddly snipping and pasting, but ended up putting the better designs in collages and adding text; which is always quite fun as Picasa's choice of fonts seems to get larger by the day,

They still look like boring wrapping paper though. I'll try to do better next year.

I've taken the plunge and put the small stones badge on my sidebar, thereby committing myself to daily blogging again in January. Just one very brief item of observational writing every day seems like it might be a good idea, and I do admire Fiona and Kaspa for their energy and talent and consistency and all-round general good-eggness - click on the badge to find out more. I still try to keep up Out with Mol form time to time, but the constraint, not of sticking to 30 words, which is good discipline and enjoyable, but of finding something new to observe in walking the same routes, and then remembering them, is often more than I manage. So I'll try small stones for a month. Then I'll probably slip back into irregular meandering posts again, but it won't do me any harm to change the pattern.

Staycation

2011-12-12T17:20:00.013+01:00

Staycation, ghastly word but an interesting idea. Some choose them, some have them thrust upon them.

Essential elements of a successful staycation: set aside a time to go on holiday (I can think of no equivalent grating rhyme/pun in Britspeak to the vacation/staycation on so the discrepancy will have to stand); save up the money to do so; tell everyone you know you are going; get the house into a reasonable state of order; generally convince yourselves of the reality of your departure.

While on staycation, spend each morning in robe and pyjamas, have plenty of books and DVDs in stock, pull the plug on the phone. Spend some time each day in a fairly energetic outdoor activity to give you an appetite and thirst for the extra eating and drinking you are likely to do, as you might if you were on real holiday, but since going for walks, bike rides etc will only reinforce one's homebound state, and the idea is to be at home but also not-at-home, in a peculiar kind of psychologically displaced state, these are not recommended, sweeping up hedge cuttings has proved to be effective.

Things not recommended for a successful home-séjour (I like that better): booking a hotel which you won't get to, getting a last-minute sick dog on your hands.

'And how's Molly?' asked my brother last week when we were making arrangements to meet in Pontorson for lunch on my birthday.

'Great.' I replied, 'still rolling around and playing about and acting like a puppy at eleven. She hasn't had ear trouble for quite a while now.'

Then I added flippantly

'She'll probably go down with it at the end of the week.'

I shouldn't have said that. The week drew on, I phoned the hotel to confirm the booking. Then on Friday morning, the day before we were due to go, Mol jumped up on the bed in the morning and squealed as she touched the right side of her head on nothing in particular, and I knew what it meant. I phoned Emy the vet to make an appointment for that afternoon, and by the time we set off for it I'd already rung hotel and brother to cancel, and Mol was curled up in a moping heap, shaking her head, walking into things disoriented and squealing every time she did so.

The hotel had already said that no deposit was necessary, simply arriving in good time on the day would confirm the booking. I asked if they were sure I didn't owe them anything for such a late cancellation, and they insisted not. I told them about the suddenness and unpredictablility of doggy ear-boils, that I was disappointed, it was my birthday, I'd been looking forward to it...

'Ah, désolé!' said the manager kindly, 'You come back and stay when your dog is better.'

That was the only time I indulged in a self-piteous sniffle. Only it wasn't really self-pity, just that kindness can undo one when brusqueness wouldn't, as we all know. But when she gets these sessions, she needs to be home and in the warm; a strange place, walks she couldn't manage, time spent in a cold car, would not have been any good.

My brother was also sympathetic but we changed the subject and had a bracing chat about septic tanks and I pulled myself together.

Emy did all the usual stuff, shaved the area in readiness for the abscess breaking open and gave her an injection and a course of a brand new magic-bullet-devil's-bargain-kill-everything-but-the-dog antibiotic. We pulled the plug on the 'phone (sorry if you were trying to reach us, as far as we were concerned we were away, I really didn't much feel like chatting) and dug ourselves in for the duration.

It really wasn't too bad, just a question of resignation and waiting. And the wonder drug really did seem to help; Mol spent a day near-comatose as before, but not apparently in great pain, and then woke up and was quite cheerful and alert, bothered and irritated by having a fat head on one side but not as ill with it as usual. I was half-afraid, as was Emy when I told her, that stopping the infection in its tracks like that might mean it didn't work its way out and she might have to have it lanced, but in fact she jumped down this morning, after keeping us awake fidgeting and grumbling for a while, and the offending abscess burst dramatically. Sorry, I'm sure no one really wants to hear about this. What a lovely birthday present! Still, better out than in and better here than in a hotel or even the car. Since then she has been recovering in leaps and bounds, almost literally. I plugged the phone back in and rang Emy to let her know, and she was pleased and interested that the results seemed favourable.

(Even at her worst, a tuna sandwich was enough to make her sit up and sniff.)

So I spent this morning, my fiftieth year to heaven (or whatever), playing with my new Kindle, chatting to my sister and er, cleaning up, enough said. Tom went out shopping to cook something for my birthday meal later, which should be nice, and when he got back we started on last year's sloe gin and orange spice liqueur.

I feel pretty chipper on the whole. Whingeing about not getting what I might think I'm entitled to doesn't seem in order; I'm not spending my 50th birthday at home, unsurrounded by troops of friends and merry conviviality late into to night because I am dull, forgotten, unloved and unlovable, and the nasty little gremlin that insinuates it's way up into my mind and tells me it is so has been sent packing, hopefully once and for all for the next fifty years at least. I am so glad and thankful that Mol has people who can and will afford to take care of her and give her priority, that I've a home I'm happy to stay in, abundance of food and drink, of warmth and comfort and security, a husband who'll shop and cook for me, plenty of evidence of affection in e-mails etc from far and wide. I really am a spoiled brat. I'm prepared to take the lesson that you just can't rely on plans. Mol's ailments have prevented me from attending my old friend's wedding, have overshadowed other trips and outings in the past, but at least this time it's only really ourselves who have been disappointed and inconvenienced - my brother and s-i-l suggest we meet in Dinan or somewhere at a later date, and probably won't beak their hearts over a cancelled lunch. Caring for what or who needs to be cared for and doing what's needful come first. Le Mont St Michel has stood for a thousand-odd years, it'll still be there later.

(Transfigured by sunbeams and suffering, but why am I having to lie on an old sheet in my beanbag?)

Other stuff.

We had a new jobbing gardener in to cut the hedges, hence the need to be sweeping up the cuttings. We were rather trepidatious about this, as he was an unknown quantity, looked a bit of a bruiser, and wasn't our old one. He quoted us about twice as much as the old one (an English friend who was always rather under-capitalised and under-equipped), a rather scary amount, but it seems we can recoup half of the cost off our income tax for next year (only works if you pay enough tax, and pay it in France). He sent us a quote which we had to agree to and sign with about 25% up front. But our worry turned to sweet relief and reassurance. He and his machine were well up to the job, he made excellent progress, and ended up doing a load of other jobs in addition which he hadn't quoted us for and charged no extra. Molly went out and had him make a fuss of her (this was before she was ill), then told him off for being an intruder in her garden as an afterthought. He told me he had a King Charles spaniel, his second, for which he liked to throw a toy chicken leg. This amused me, and endeared him, as he looked the type who'd be more likely to keep a Beauceron on a chain or similar. He really made a very good job of the hedges.

I enjoy Christmas baking because it is very largely optional. I am a rubbish pastry cook and can make even bought pastry brown, hard and unappetising. However, in the spirit of staycational departure from norms and routines, I decided to get into a bit of fusion cooking: mince pies made with gâteau breton dough (I took the recipe and instructions from the video in the link, which is good but with junky ads on before the main clip. I halved the quantities which still made plenty).

I reckon that gâteau breton is pretty much idiot-proof and will taste good whatever you do to it, and am thinking of exploring other possibilities, such as rolling it thinner, making a sandwich with medlar paste, and serving the resulting cake cut into traditional lozenges with medlar fool.

I disembowelled the last of the medlars listening to Radio 4's dramatisation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, which proved to be hilariously appropriate in a predictably gross-out kind of way.

So there it is. I shall put the Condrieu to chill which was supposed to be for last year's birthday but we never got around to drinking it, and I've been doing a Silas Marner and getting it out and looking at it and putting it away again ever since, and enjoy my fish dish that is planned.

You can bring on the next half-century.

The week before turning fifty

2011-12-07T23:06:00.002+01:00

White shreds of birch bark whisper in your ear
like prayer flags; they buzz and flitter like the wings
of the last insects of the damp and dying year.

You know this place of yours is still unmade,
and never will be finished now, or put quite straight;
you know too there will still be small, white, late
self-seeded snapdragons and orange marigolds
under the darkening hydrangea's violet shade.

And from your grave, sleep-softened face
- the lines and weight that morning brings -
you think perhaps you might even have done
some brave, as well as weak and stupid, things.

Medlar update.

2011-12-05T23:00:00.000+01:00

The medlars are bletting to perfection; an old bronze in colour, evenly, heavily soft, their skin, like an old person's, the way my hands are becoming, holding the depression when pushed gently inwards. A few of them fail in this delicate balance of decay, and a hairy mould penetrates through lesions and spoils the taste with mustiness, but many of them are quite flawless. Sometimes when turning them and bringing in the ones that are ready, I stand outside in the cool damp winter air and pick a hole in one and suck the flesh out, as it's recommended you should. Something of dates, something of apple butter, something of spices.

Mostly though I bring them in, scoop out the pulp and freeze it in batches, planning a vast medlar fool for the turn of the year. I've developed a method of taking them apart: with a sharp serrated knife take the stalk end off and peel the skin away downward, then turn them over and remove the star shaped crown ( the 'open arse' in some parlance!), taking out the seeds with it, count these out, there are five in each, unfailingly. I sometimes lick the flesh off the seeds.

I stopped again at the rather dour modern house which has the trees in front of it, climbed the outside stairway at the side and pressed the button of the doorbell. After a moment a birdy old lady opened it - the bell didn't work, she said.

I asked if I could take some medlars, and she was more than happy, but said they were hard and sour, that she didn't really know what to do with them. I explained that I was ripening them, and we chatted a bit, agreed that, although jam was a possibility, we didn't in fact eat that much jam, and there'd been so much other fruit, the apples were overwhelming, but then the birds have to eat too... Now when the children were young, she recalled, they used to eat the medlars all the time. Don't they have a lot of big seeds inside? Take all you want, she repeated.

So I was able to shuffle through the leaf litter in the beds under the trees and find the unblemished, hard, russety globes with my feet ( the ones I picked up the week before had mostly fallen on the road surface so that many were damaged) and fill a cotton shopping bag with them, and these are the ones I've been gradually mining from the straw box in the barn.

Last day of November

2011-11-30T23:13:00.002+01:00

Well, here we are and I've managed to come up with something for every day of November. It's been good to see a number of other bloggers who have drifted off a bit of recent times coming back and warming up to it again.

I thought I'd be raiding the external hard drive for old pictures but in fact I haven't, and have found that I'm thinking about photography again and picking the camera up more often, which can't be bad. I don't feel that I've had a great deal of consequence to say for myself, but then when I'm asking people to look in every day it's probably just as well not to be blathering on too much.

The less said the better, sometimes, more and more I feel. I've found myself much more inclined to read blogs without an obligation to comment than I used to. Yet I sometimes also fear that I take few risks, put myself out very little, that my blogging is safe, bland and anodyne. But I also know my limits, and they are legion.

Very saddening in the last couple of days to see the departure of someone who I hope has genuinely become a friend in the world as well as in the blogging spirit, and who, however quirky, eccentric, occasionally abrasive or truculent, has enriched my life and my comments threads with extraordinary wit, humour, imagination ( a lot of that!) compassion, kindness, compliments and affection. He says he has taken a risk too many, not played safe enough, and rues the consequences. This feels all wrong, but brings home once again the sense that our on-line lives are rather vulnerable and precarious. Yet I still value this way of making a window into our lives, however small, selective and infrequently opened; it has brought new friends in and brought old ones closer, and strengthened ans stimulated more private conversation. But when the window closes, there's a danger we'll disappear to one another. I don't know whether this is something to worry about or not.

Ah well. So then we here at home ended up having a ... discussion, about what I rather antagonistically and pejoratively called the doctrine of detachment, and which I equally antagonistically and pejoratively attacked as being potentially glib and disingenuous. (I can be an argumentative cuss). About how much responsibility we need to take for the effect our words and/or actions have on others, the role of intention in the matter, and ultimately the nature of the self that acts or is acted on. These things happen round here. We didn't exactly reach any conclusions but we didn't end up divorcing either. And it made me think I'd go and look up Marcus Aurelius.

I found him on Tom's shelf because I'd passed him on to him. And it really must be a long time since I read any, since I found this marking a page:

It's a label from the 1992 vintage of Burrow Hill's Somerset Cider Brandy (what it says on the tin, really). I think they sent this, just the label, to me with an offer because I'd bought half a bottle of the first year ever. If I'd kept it it might be worth a bit now, but I finished it one night with one of my nieces after she'd just finished a boyfriend.

Marcus Aurelius was just too dense to plunder for a quick soundbite about detachment, and even the dictionary of quotations didn't yield too much, except that he was to be found between St Augustine who said

To Carthage I came and there sang all around me a cauldron of unholy loves

and Jane Austen who had Emma's dad saying

The sooner every party breaks up the better.

So on that note, and because if I don't stop soon it will no longer be November and my pledge will be broken, I will close here. With some random pictures.

This is the sign for our village. It means 'The Holly', and I'm quite sure that old Marcel, whose house and holly tree this is, the first house in the village, insisted that they put the sign there.

More holly,

and mistletoe. Very festive.

She's probably hoping she's not going to be festive,

and she's getting out of here in case.

Bunnies and pumpkins,

moutons,

and don't forget the vegetables.

Cider apples and more fungal fun

2011-11-29T19:15:00.000+01:00

This pile of apples for cider appears at the roadside on one of my regular routes every year, this is the first time I've remembered the camera and made the time to stop for it. The morbidly picturesque levels of decay of the apples will not put me off the next coruscating glass of the delectable beverage I enjoy; I trust to the time-honoured practice of fermentation to render all things pure to the pure. And I notice that some willow leaves have also made their way into the mix, thereby perhaps supplying some useful salicylic acid to offset the headache-provoking properties of the final product. Yum.

And further to this paean to the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness, rot, fungus and decay, a collection of mushrooms and toadstools. My friend E found a real cep today in the woods near her house, though not a very large one, I have never been so lucky. She was going to take it to the pharmacy to be sure, and a field mouse or some such had had a little go at it first, but she was looking forward to eating it later. Never such a year for fungi, so late.

Just one more blogging day to go!

Parcel

2011-11-28T22:22:00.000+01:00

A big parcel arrived this morning, as is often the case it came from my sister. It occurred to me that the whole business of monetary exchange and consumption, of acquiring stuff in general, is possibly a manipulated surrogate for the giving and receiving of gifts; we seek to achieve the same warmth we feel when we give or receive with love by exchanging money and giving to ourselves, feeding a craving which can only remain unsatisfied.

On the other hand it can be very nice to treat yourself, and the wrong present given in a spirit of dull obligation without love or discernment is a sorry thing, so perhaps I'm talking bollocks.

To return to the parcel; it contained, among other things: a white elephant tea cosy and two black bird coffee cosies; saffron, argan oil, nigella seeds and almond skin cream that smells of marzipan from Morocco; and a CD of just short of 200 photos of that country and a request that if I could manage it, could I edit them and get them printed as Moo postcards. I've done this before for my sister's holiday photos; she was a bit apologetic this time, fearing that, she felt, the photos weren't very good and perhaps I couldn't make much of them ... She has quite an old and simple compact, and was not, I got the feeling, as stimulated and relaxed on this trip as on others, so the photos were quite patchy, but well worth sifting, cleaning up and trimming.

And it just so happened that Moo had sent out an e-mail that their 30% off everything sale was closing at midnight tonight, so the job was on to get sixty images sorted out in the space of today.

Bliss and joy. I love editing photos, and consequently feel it's an unjustifiable self-indulgence that I don't deserve to spend too much time on. However, doing it for love for someone else, who has made and done endless lovely things for us, with a serious money-saving deadline to boot, allowed me to spend every available moment on it today.

I'm sure this ought to be something one could do for money. People have taken on board the idea that digital photography allows them to snap away with total abandon in pursuit of one good shot out of many, but often underestimate the time and effort this scattergun approach requires in editing. How often have you heard people groan about being subjected to other people's endless unedited holiday photos?

But going through them and sorting out the better ones, touching out the odd unwanted lamp post or electricity cable and cropping off the fat bald strangers wandering through the shot, brightening the pictures up, and snipping bits and pieces out of even the least interesting of them to make into patchwork collages, makes this potentially frustrating and passive experience a satisfying one. I started off finding this rather muddled welter of images of Morocco quite off-putting, but by the end I felt I had shared something of it and enjoyed it.

However, I know my sister's eye and understand a little of what matters to her, and I don't mind taking a lot of time and trouble over it. I'm not sure I could do the same for strangers' snaps of themselves getting drunk and sunburned on beaches on the Maldives. Sorry, I know that sounds horribly judgemental.

Anyway, here's a handful of them. Not my photos, just my editing.

Haiku, some orange things I made, looking up in St Brieuc...

2011-11-27T23:46:00.002+01:00

~
Tending to curse darkness,
it takes two matches, then
the beeswax kindles.
~

The clementine marmalade potted up last night still looked runny, but when I opened a jar, it had a reasonable soft set on it. No need to pour it all back into the pan.

And to match the marmalade, I finally sewed all the corners and the ends in on this rather quaint garment, knitted in one piece on a circular needle from a pack of yarn from a cheap supermarket of German origin which will remain nameless.

Not the most elegant or flattering item of clothing, but I worked the pattern out myself on squared paper, and it is very chunky yarn, so that's hardly surprising. The big old Bakelite buttons which I found in the button tin, came, I think, from an old coat of my mum's. I do like wearing warm sleeveless things in winter, down the back seems to be the coldest part.

First Sunday in Advent, time for the first mince pie of the season and to listening to the Advent service on Radio 3, perhaps the moment I feel happiest about Christmas.

I went into St Brieuc the other day where they were putting the Christmas lights in the trees with a crane vehicle thing.

A number of people, like the woman on the bike with the child on the back, and me, stopped to watch and remark on this, which may indicate a lack of sophistication or much else going on, but I prefer to think it shows a curiosity and pleasure in life.

I'd taken the camera because of late I've got out of the habit rather, and then now and then I see something I'd like to snap and regret not having it, and there are also certain things I've meant to record for a long time. One of them is this frieze on the pediment of the post office in St Brieuc. It features a topless classical kind of god and goddess, of benign rather than fearsome aspect, but the god has a quill pen in one hand and an old-fashioned telegraph machine, like the one in 'Lark Rise to Candleford', in the other, and the goddess, naked breasts akimbo, is chatting on the phone and leaning on a mail box, with a telegraph pole and wires in the background. I've long loved this bit of municipal sculpture, which I now notice is signed 'Le Goff' and probably I ought to find out more about it; I can't quite work out how much conscious humour it contains.

Fly agaric

2011-11-26T19:07:00.001+01:00

Just a quick collage for a Saturday night.

All done up like a dog's dinner - but is it good enough for Molly Roux Jr?

2011-11-25T18:54:00.001+01:00

'I had a lovely dream,' said Tom, unusually seraphic for that time of the morning 'it was a cooking dream. I was cooking.'
Sounds like a good dream to me too.
'Really well, much better than I ever cook in real life.'
'Were you cooking for Michel Roux jr?'
'I was, I was cooking with him!'
'What did you make?'
'I can't remember, but I was wearing a mask of Monica Galetti. It was only a joke, I took it off and everyone laughed.'

Molly, who watches Masterchef Pro with us, was distressed to learn that according to cheffy wisdom, it is really impossible to achieve truly effective, beautiful presentation with food served in a bowl, since, being a dog, that's what she gets to eat out of. She is undoubtedly being short-changed. So we decided to remedy this, and that evening plated her dinner up (for that is the term one uses) on a flat plate. (Yes, OK, it's a paper one but, easy-going as we are in such matters we didn't really fancy her eating off one of ours):

For Molly's main course, we have prepared a duo of croquettes - Royal Canin's Hypoallergenic and Specific's Food Allergy Management - topped with some doggy puffed rice and a bit of beaten egg out of the fridge scrambled in the microwave. This is served with rondelles of carrot and fannied up with some shreds of duck leg meat (yes, she really does get to eat this, in small quantities), brought together with an arrosage of jus and surmounted with a raw broccoli floret.

Molly is an internationally renowned dog-food critic and gastronome whose opinion can make or break a chef's reputation, but she scoffed it down quite happily so I guess I'm OK to go on working here. In fact she is totally incapable of eating off a plate without scooting it all aver the floor so we had to empty it into her melamine bowl anyway, presentation notwithstanding, but she carefully picked the broccoli floret off and ate it first, so I that must mean the thumbs up for that element of the meal.

Ok, its Friday night and the 25th of the month, you want something sensible?

Galling things

2011-11-24T22:54:00.000+01:00

Some nerdy nature-table entomological material now.

Galls are a fascinating subject (to me anyway). They are the kind of growths and excrescences on plants, especially trees and other woody ones usually caused by parasitical insects, though they can also come about through fungi or bacteria or occasionally other plants like mistletoe. Wiki describes how

they are plant tissue which is controlled by the insect. Galls act as both the habitat and food source for the maker of the gall

Perhaps one of the best known is the oak apple. For a long time I only remember seeing these as the near-perfect woody spheres the size of large marbles with the tiny hole in one end, like the ones above - these are quite old, this tree had a number of them on its lower twigs at one time, now there are fewer. Calling them apples seemed rather strange, but later I discovered them as they are in spring, larger, spongy textured greenish and rosy, and they really do look quite like apples. They are caused by chemicals injected by the larva of certain kinds of wasp in the family Cynipidae, it seems.

Lately though I've noticed what I thought at first were some odd-shaped acorns on the ground where Molly and I walk on the avenue approaching the Château de Bogard. Then there were some rather unusual large acorns in shaggy cups.

The oaks with the shaggy-cupped acorns turned out to be turkey oaks. They're called this, it seems, not because they originated in Turkey but because turkeys liked to eat the acorns. The weirdly shaped things were galls on regular, quercus robur pedunculate 'English' oak acorns. They turned out to be the delightfully named Knopper galls; Wiki says

The word 'knopper' derives from the German word 'knoppe' meaning a kind of felt cap or helmet worn during the 17th-century; also a small rounded protuberance, often decorative, such as a stud, a tassel or a knob

These are an extraordinary phenomenon, the product of a small wasp, andricus quercuscalicis, which needs two generations to breed, during one of which it is all female and parthenogenetic, and during the other two-sexed. But it also needs two breeds of oak, the turkey and the robur one, to complete this cycle. It only parasitises the turkey oak catkins lightly in the first stage, but by attacking the acorns of the robur in the second it can threaten the fertility of that tree, so in some parts of the UK it's been mooted that the turkey oaks (introduced in the 18th century, the gall wasps appeared in the last 50 years) should be eradicated to benefit the indigenous species. I don't know what the policy on them is here, this is the only place I've noticed turkey oaks growing in any numbers, or seen the galls, and the regular robur-type oaks around here don't seem to have any problems setting seedlings, we find them growing like weeds all over the garden, planted by field mice and voles, I assume.

The wasp lives the season inside the gall, then makes its way out through a hole it makes at the end, as you can see in the one above. Apparently, the galls can also be a home to other fellow-traveller insects which also benefit from the micro-habitat they create, these kind of housemate creatures are known as inquilines, another new word I've learned.

The other gall-producing insect I've learned about I noticed the evidence of while foraging for beech mast, these tiny, pip-shaped growths on the fallen beech leaves:

They are made by a gall midge, mikiola fagi. This leaf had an unusually large collection of four galls, mostly there was just one, on very few leaves. I thought they'd they'd be juicy and quite tender, and was slightly squeamish about squeezing one, in case the insect should pop out! But in fact they were very hard, as hard as wood, which shows how successfully the insect is at converting and controlling the plant tissue for its own use.

Surprising what you can find kicking through the leaf litter, and kicking about on the internet too.

23 bullets

2011-11-23T21:24:00.000+01:00

Someone suggested bullet points, there are numbers too, I notice, so I'll try to get 23 done for the 23rd of the month. ( I've got other stuff, really I have, it's just not edited properly...)

Hanging out a small load of washing, I understand I've become fond and possess quite a number of clothes of a slate blue colour. Though mostly winter ones.
Cleaned the swatted flies off the kitchen window.
Clean the dog-nose marks off the front window.
Bugger it's a non-drinking night.
As a youngster I wrote a list of things I hated. I told my mum. She said 'When you've got a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp why don't you write a list of the things you like?' This has stayed with me.
Wholegrain, Dijon or Coleman's English.
My father once said 'That was nice I must have been hungry'. This was never forgiven, or at least not forgotten.
I'm wearing brown pyjamas (which I wish I could spell 'pajamas') and a blue fleece robe, not a dressing gown as it doesn't have a front opening but pulls over my head, with a hood.
The British Corner Shop have just made me an offer of a Christmas pudding which I can refuse.
I think perhaps when it comes to risotto I have no limit of capacity, but I haven't tested this out.
Jeremiah Coleman, I've heard them repeat, made his fortune from the mustard that folks didn't eat.
Today I saw a very new-looking Citroen in a deep chocolate brown colour, a true brown. Can it be that brown cars really are making a comeback?
I get caught out time and again.
Constable didn't come from Dunstable.
Barking mad dog.
That helicopter really copped it.
Jeremiah Coleman, of Norwich late and great, made his fortune from mustard that folks left on their plate.
What on earth am I supposed to do with a large bottle of orange-flower water?
If in doubt use the past simple.
Find out more about gall wasps.
No one knows where the word 'bap' for a soft round bread roll comes from, but I wonder if it is related to 'kebab'? They sell the big soft rounds of bread for those here as 'kebap'.
I'm going to get myself a cherry syrup fizz.
A dear little blue silicone spoon (shown near life-size)

which came with a twin spatula, but they had to be separated. It shoulders its way around the awkwardest corners of jam jars, and licks the mini-blender as clean as a whistle.

That'll do for today.

More grub stuff

2011-11-22T23:22:00.000+01:00

As Nablopomo wears on I've noticed people are posting rather a lot about what they've been having to eat, and I'm afraid I'm no exception. However, many people seem to quite like chatting about foodstuffs, so here's a generally comestible-related post.

This mild, moist late autumn has brought out an explosion of mushrooms and toadstools everywhere. I wanted Mol to pose beside this shaggy parasol to give an impression of its impressive size, but she wasn't too keen. I seldom bother gathering these, and they're short on flavour and can be woody, and this one was too big and wet anyway. Tom is carrying the umbrella not because it was raining, though it did a bit, but because we use it to fend off nuisance dogs, and it also gives us an air of stereotypical eccentricity to be seen carrying a classic black town umbrella around the countryside on a sunny day without a cloud in the sky. I gathered some good brown mushrooms the day before, and made them into duxelles, which I freeze in small portions in cake papers. I took a photo of this in the making but it looked fairly unattractive. Tastes good though.

As did the medlar fool. Four of the medlars were bletted enough to eat, ie on the point of going mouldy, so nothing for it but to get in there with a coffee spoon and fingers, which yielded a surprising amount of delicious deliquescing gloop, which I blended with brandy and brown and vanilla sugar, folded into lightly whipped cream and topped with a pinch of cinnamon and a crumbled amaretti biscuit. I think I have a culinary crush on medlars.

Caught a bit of Pointless this evening, a round on foods beginning with the letter 'c'. Apparently many more people (out of a sample of 100, anyway) in the UK know that ciabatta is bread than know that Caerphilly is cheese. I could come on all Food-Programme judgemental and sanctimonious about what that says about people's ignorance of indigenous food traditions and the power of the supermarkets, but I've ranted enough and I'm not sure it wouldn't be glib and unjustified; food practices, styles and terms have always been mobile and migratory anyway, perhaps.

Also watched professional Masterchef, the only version of the programme I will watch. Michel Roux Jr is rather wonderful, we think, a bon vivant with the mien of a fanatical Cistercian friar, but a very kind heart. Still, it was unfair of them to make them pluck and draw that woodpigeon, really.

Dinner: chicken with chopped pistachios, toasted beech nuts, preserved lemons and honey, served with chickpeas dresses with basil, mint and chopped tomato. The preserved lemons - citrons confits - were in a pretty, expensive jar from an gift shop in Lamballe where I had a credit note. You can get them cheaply enough in plastic or not very pretty glass jars in any supermarket but somehow they're much more tempting to use from an expensive pretty ones.

Pistachios remind me of the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf, where they seem to be the staple crop - I think in Greek they're called something like fistakkia Aegina whereas fistakkia are just peanuts (as I remember, but anyone can put me straight on that). The island was covered in orchards of them, and the shells seemed to cover the ground everywhere like shingle, and everything possible to eat seemed to contain them.

Chickpeas are one of the oldest things people ever cultivated, which I think is rather amazing.

I imagine I might be the only person ever to combine beech nuts with preserved lemon in a dish.

I promise to post about something other than food tomorrow!

Just a couple of lifted things

2011-11-21T21:58:00.000+01:00

When a previously unfamiliar poem evokes a feeling of 'belonging' or coming home, it is exceptionally affecting. Our bridges are relatively few between the outer world and our inner world. Increasingly we need those bridges and those mythical horses - and the gods they carry.

( Stephanie Dowrick - In the company of Rilke. A shot in the dark this book, and not too sure about it, fearing a bit of a woolly New Age spiritual take on RMR, but I think I quite like where it's going, a kind of extended reader's response, with a smorgasbord of interesting references.

Picture - Circus Horse, Pierre Bonnard, c.1936)

Anyone for kig ha farz ?

2011-11-20T18:36:00.001+01:00

So off we went to le Rosabelle restaurant, a rather handsome, solitary old building out on the road that leads up to Erquy etc, perhaps half an hour's drive away. Not a particularly attractive location in itself though set well back from the road, and so not really a tourist restaurant though they may get some passing trade from people going up to the coast, and they offer plenty of seafood. It's quite a bit cheaper than the seafront places, and we got the feeling it's a place for people who like their food and probably go back regularly. It's very spacious and quite simple, though quite elegant, and they've a second room for functions and loads of parking space and grassy areas outside so probably do well on weddings and other big parties. A big fluffy black cat met us outside and escorted us in.

Tom opted out of kig ha farz (thanks Setu for the note in the comments before on the correct spelling; I'm happy to say they spelled it properly on the board and menu!) in part because he couldn't resist the oysters on the other menu, and in part because he was wary of the boiled meats.

Here I am going to digress into a bit of a grouch about the things French people often say to British people about our perceived execrable eating habits. Along with the ideas that we are bizarre in enjoying sucré-salé (sweet and savoury mixed) flavours and that we breadcrumb everything, there is the frequent accusation that we boil all our meat.

Let's address the sucré-salé question first: yes, we like chutney with all kinds of things, redcurrant jelly with our lamb and other meats, and indeed a number of other sweet and savoury combinations. In doing so we are expanding traditions of spicing and sweetening from afar in space and time coming out of the cuisine of the east and dating back from the mediaeval period all over Europe (admittedly that was partly because the meat was half-rotten and spicing and sweetening it to buggery was one way to make it palatable, but that wasn't exclusive to Britain). But I would also point out that there are many very traditional sucré-salé combinations in French cooking as well: pork with apple or prunes, foie gras with cherry or fig conserves, the Provencal (I think) speciality confiture d'oignons, the absolutely delectable practice of topping beef carbonnade with a piece of gingerbread spread with mustard to make a crust, even the addition of orange to beef daube could be seen as mixing fruit and meat flavours. The very existence of the term sucré-salé  in French has no real English equivalent. So why time and again the snooty wrinkling of the nose and the 'oh but you English like sucré-salé...'

(Marmalade or even maple syrup on our bacon is not common British practice, but I was introduced to the latter in new Zealand and it was delicious.)

The breadcrumbed coating, well yes I suppose I probably ate my share of fishfingers as a kid, though I liked the battered ones best, but there are plenty of those to be seen in the shopping trolleys of the young French mothers I see in the queues in front of me too, and chicken nuggets.

But it's the meat-boiling thing that really bugs me. I think I can honestly say as an English person I have never at any time boiled any meat. Neither did my mother before me nor hers before her, I'm quite sure ( with the possible exception of boiled bacon, which has to be boiled else one dies of salt poisoning). You, my French friends of my dear adopted land, you are the ones who boil your meat. You boil your meat in pot au feu, you boil your meat in navarin d'agneau, you boil your meat in poule au pot (as your good king Henri-Quatre wished that you should, every Sunday) , you boil your meat in daube de boeuf and in boeuf  à la ficelle, and doubtless you boil your meat in sundry other regional specialities I know not of.

J'accuse. You boil your meat.

We, the English, we do not boil our meat. We roast it. That is why when you wish to insult us mildly you call us rosbifs. QED.

Anyway, this is going nowhere, as I don't imagine many French people read here in any depth, apart from Setu, who is Breton anyway, and apparently at home in every language, place and culture under the sun, or at least in Europe, and hopefully will forgive me the anglocentric rant.

Not that I'm saying one shouldn't ever boil, or at least simmer it (mijoter is a nice word)  meat, because the results can be excellent, which brings me back to the kig ha farz.  The two ladies who were serving, who were super and very efficient, one brisk and a bit formidable, the other prettier and more kindly (she kept bestowing special smiles on Tom, we think it was his jacket), brought me a one huge russet-coloured earthenware pot containing meats and vegetables in broth and another plate with a slightly smaller dish containing the buckwheat dumpling (the farz, I believe) also in some broth and a little pot of mustardy sauce.

'It's all for you,' the more bossy one told me 'it's very copious.'

I looked at it.

'Can I have a takeaway container for the leftovers?' I asked.

They happily brought me one, and brought Tom his oysters, then his monkfish, which very well cooked but the cherry sauce - hey, more sucré-salé! - was a bit strange both to look at and to taste, overall he was happy, though half wishing he'd been bolder and joined me in the kig ha farz. They had served me very promptly, I had no starter and barely time to eat any olives and crackers with my aperitif, so my appetite, which I had been nurturing all day, was not spoiled. I ate slowly, and my one course lasted through three of Tom's, and I just kept on and on eating it.

Among the meats there was a piece of beef, shreddingly tender and flavourful, a piece of ham hock, a good chunk of sausage and a small bit of demi-sel (salt-cured belly pork), which was the kind of thing Tom was fearful of because of fat and gristle, but which was so meltingly tender that the fat was almost rendered away. So the meat was good but in one of the really nice things about it was the vegetables; there was a good quarter of cabbage, plenty of onion, a piece of fennel bulb, a big potato, a long baton of carrot, and several bits of cardoon. It's quite unusual to get such a vegetable rich meal here, in fact, and because everything had cooked in and on the broth it was full of flavour and texture. As to the buckwheat preparation, it was certainly substantial! Not quite how I imagined, less crumbly - sometimes I gather people roll and pound the bag before they take the farz out of it, so it breaks into crumbs rather the consistency of couscous - with some sultanas in it (I'm not sure that purists go along with these, but I've seen quite a few recipes which add them) and a taste a bit like chestnuts. I've eaten plenty of buckwheat pancakes and cooked the grain as an accompaniment, but this was different again.

As Tom was getting to the end of his cheese course ( a proper good-looking cheese board that you could have whatever you liked from) I announced that I was going to finish it all, and apart from a bit of broth and sauce and some trimmings, I did. Tom asked if I wanted any of his cheese which I declined that, but still ate some ice cream afterwards. Ice cream can always find some gaps to slip through, I find. The two serving ladies almost patted me on the head and said to one another

'Look, she's eaten it all, no leftovers!' and took the take away container away again.

It was just the day after the Beaujolais nouveau had arrived, and they were offering that, along with Côtes du Rhône nouveau (primeur, I think, strictly), which I'd not come across before. I never cared much for  Beaujolais nouveau (I like the crus, don't mind the villages) but I was happy to try the other and enjoyed it.

When we got there at 8-ish there were a couple of couples already installed, but it filled up with a pleasantly mixed clientèle, a small group of oldies, a huge family group with babies and teenagers and all, all well-behaved at least while we were there, and then behind us two women, who were maybe a couple, with another elderly couple and a beautiful cream colour Alsatian-cross dog who sniffed at me politely and only got a little bit excited when the cat swept past rather teasingly. The older lady made a very indulgent fuss of the dog who seemed to belong to the two women. They all shared a kig ha farz and so then it came with the different elements in separate dishes which they dipped into as they wished, which would be a really nice way to eat it. I've just got to find a few more people who'd like to join me...

( If you look at the menus on the restaurant site, the kig ha farz counts as tête de veau, which is prepared on another Friday in the month. We won't be heading out for that one, I'm afraid; I'm not that assimilated or adventurous.)

Nabloblahblah

2011-11-19T20:39:00.000+01:00

Nothing much tonight; it is Saturday and I am going to sit down with my husband and dog and watch a film or something, and so should you, or the equivalent anyway, not sitting down with my husband and dog that is to say.

Nevertheless I found I had nine photos cropped to square of late autumnal things in the garden so that was enough for a collage, which will have to do.

Life drawing

2011-11-18T19:05:00.000+01:00

Life drawing took place as scheduled and was wonderful. Drawing is something which can render me completely absorbed and blissfully happy but which for long stretches of time I just don't do, and then trying to get back into it is difficult. Most of what I produced was unmitigated rubbish; if I didn't know that I was once capable of reasonably competent figure drawing I would have been discouraged, but by the end, from about six or eight poses and drawings I did one which I was able to put aside and feel not displeased with, and C, the tutor, came by and looked at it and asked if I wanted him to fix it, so that seemed like a mark of approval anyway. It's got a lot of faults which are evident and I don't need to catalogue, but it's got some good bits too, and I reckon at the end of ten sessions I should be turning out acceptable work. Using charcoal is a sensual delight it was great to be reacquainted with too.

The model was lovely, about my age I guess, an artist herself and very still and strong. She held some very interesting and difficult poses which she mostly chose herself.

Bring on the next one (who will be pregnant, they tell us).

We had a discussion as to whether posting this here was OK, and whether I shouldn't post a NSFW warning but Tom, who's not without a Puritan streak, said he's never heard of anything so silly so I hope he's right. I brought it home and put it across an armchair to look at and the next thing I knew Molly was trying to snuggle up to it, hence the creases.

Now we're off to eat kig-ar-farz for the first time ever. This is, as far as I can gather, a version of pot-au-feu with the addition of a large buckwheat dumpling cooked in a bag in the broth. It is a speciality of the Leon region of north Finistere but we have located a restaurant not far from here where they cook it once a month, and tonight's the night!

Have a good Friday yourselves.

A hasty post

2011-11-17T18:22:00.001+01:00

Because I got sidetracked looking up Psalm 15, after reading BB's post on friendship and then quoting 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills'. This reminded me of how my mum liked to recite it, along with the other one said to be the definition of a gentleman, the only bit I could remember of which was about not putting his money out to usury. So I looked it up and it turned out to be no 15 It kind of tickled me that it commends

He that backbiteth not with his tongue,
nor doeth evil to his neighbor,
nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor

since my mother could not have been said to have been entirely free of these faults, any more than I am: she fell out with just about every neighbour we ever had and wasn't always very kind about my father's family when they weren't there. However, I still remember with pride how she shut up our very loquacious aunt, my father's sister, a Franciscan nun and a terrible snob, by reciting all of Psalm 15 to her when said aunt was wittering on about social status and their antecedents being gentlemen farmers or something.

Whatever my mother's faults, I shall always appreciate the grounding she gave me in classics of English poetry. Not quite enough to equip me to hold my own but gets me somewhere with Heather, who e-mailed me today thanking me for the postcard I'd sent her of the Ravilious painting of Two Women in a Garden, which she said wafted her out of constructed space, and I am delighted and somewhat amazed that I can count among my friends a formidable octogenarian grande-dame of letters who e-mails me to say something like that.

A recent friend, it's true, not of the five years standing that BB says he tends to feel is necessary for certainty of amity. I pondered this, as I had been feeling a little melancholic about friends and friendship, but then I remembered my really old friends. Which kind of tied in with the psalm thing. Along with them I went to a very strange educational establishment where, even in the 1970s, we all had a psalter as well as our red and blue hymn books, and we were required to know how to chant psalms, observing the single and double pauses, and sing the gloria. I can't say this experience left as much trace as my mother's learning by heart did her, but I'm pretty sure that Fire Bird and I could get to the end of our lives and we could still make each other laugh by intoning '...in his tabernacle... from one generation to another'. And we'd probably find something new to talk about as well.

Saving seeds. Actually got out in the garden for a bit today.

I got sidetracked too talking to my sister, who is also my friend, and who says she has blackbird coffee cosies in stock, so another newer friend can have one. And I'm also in haste because I am hoping to get third time lucky with my life-drawing class: the first time the model failed to show so we had to draw each other - with our clothes ON, it was rescheduled so I turned up but no one else did (I hadn't left a contact no), but perhaps tonight will work out. So I must be off.

Rotten and crabby

2011-11-16T19:09:00.000+01:00

The apples, not me. Not always anyway.

Finch's nest

2011-11-15T23:02:00.002+01:00

Finch's nest, never used, blown down one stormy night.

Made with blue lichen, moss, twigs and thistledown,

stitched with bright baler twine, an arc of one horse hair,

and tiny feathers from the hens (or even the white peacock), lined

with kapok from an old quilt thrown away inside the shed,

given as treasure, and brought to show me in a plastic box.

Multiples

2011-11-14T21:16:00.000+01:00

Coming up to midway and flagging a bit, so tending to the pictorial. Time for some multiple exposure collages.

Pretty pink pomegranate pictures

2011-11-13T21:34:00.000+01:00

Hair cut

2011-11-12T15:24:00.001+01:00

Got to the point where the only way I could tolerate my hair so long was to tie it up hard then put it up in a thing with a spike through it, which device probably has a name but I don't know it, it's made of leather and wood and looks like the prototype might have been found in a bronze age archaeological site as part of some female hunter-gatherer's grave goods. Also, when it gets past a critical length it starts falling out and blocking the plug hole.

So off I went to the hairdresser, one of a chain with a particularly horrible yellow and grey décor, whose main attraction is you don't make an appointment, and rarely have to wait more than half an hour which is about the limit of my tolerance for reading old copies of Paris-Match (I seldom remember to bring a book, but anyway I see hairdresser's and doctor's waiting rooms as a salutary opportunity to dip my toe into the cultural milieu of my host country via its popular magazines; as I say, the wait in both places is not usually too long but usually quite long enough).

But the hairdressers are always nice, and not frumpy or incompetent, and this time I got quite a trendy young one. I told her I was fed up with the length, and would like quite a bit off. About to here? she indicated roughly the level of my chin. Fine, I said, then tentatively asked if perhaps she could cut the back shorter than the front, just by way of a change...

Her eyes lit up:

'Carré plongeant!* C'est très à la môde!'

Well that's a first, I thought. She set to work with energy and a will, darting and snipping with her little scissors. How blithely we trust hairdressers, I thought, with their razor-sharp blades and dagger-like points around our necks, ears, eyes and throats. The tips of her scissors scored and prickled my neck but never hurt; she was clearly enjoying herself. Could she cut it quite short at the back? she asked, and what about the fringe (bangs if you're American, which always sounds bizarre to me), could she do that at an angle?

Why not, I said, so delighted with the novel experience of a hairdresser enthusiastically engaged with my hair, rather than just sighing boredly and asking why don't I colour it? The best bit was when she did the sides, holding a wide section down and drawing the scissors through all of it on the diagonal with a satisfying slicing sound, just like a haberdasher cutting through a length of calico. She shaped it and dried it with a big round brush and generally sculpted it in ways I didn't imagine possible with my grizzled mop. I left with a spring in my step, invigorated by the fresh breeze on the back of my neck, and allowed her to sell me an expensive thing of conditioner to help maintain it.

It's hopeless, of course. I have neither the kind of hair, the kind of face not the kind of life that permits a très à la môde, beautifully sculpted carré plongeant hair-do. Within twenty-four hours the whole is a mass of different length ends blowing about in the wind, the cow-licks on either side of my forehead have re-established themselves with a vengeance and the spiffy sharp points at the corners of the plunging square are hanging down all on their own like pot-hooks. I knew it would happen, but I don't care, we had fun, and it's still so good to feel the air on the back of my neck again.

The photos were taken on the same day, while it was still just about holding together, in the rather unpleasant livid light of the old downstairs bathroom.

* Literally a 'plunging square'; I've tried to find a translation, the best seems to be 'angled bob'. My mum used to talk about shingled hair, from the 1920s, which I always liked the sound of.

Meddling with medlars,'and al was for an appil...'

2011-11-11T22:56:00.004+01:00

The two medlar trees by a rather sombre, fairly modern house on a route I take every week are dropping so much fruit all about that no one seems to be collecting I was determined to try by fair means or foul to get hold of a reasonable quantity of it. So this week I stopped on my way home and somewhat trepidatiously took the steps up to the door at the side of the building which seemed to be the main entrance and rang the bell. There were windows a-plenty open, and I was sure I heard movements and voices inside, but no one came, so I went back down and gathered an armload of dropped ones. As I was doing so, a cheery group of bin men stopped at the house. A young black guy saw my haul and grinned,

'What are they?' he asked

'Medlars (des nèfles)' his mates replied in chorus, and before I knew it they were all jumping down, picking up the fruit, chucking them about and engaging in an excited exchange about them with which I was eager to join in but I was a little afraid that all the brouhaha would draw the house's inhabitants out. I repeated a couple of times that I had gone to the door to ask first...

'No, they aren't ripe, you can't eat them like that, you have to wait for them to rot...'

'Can you make jam with them then?'

'What country are you from then?'

Etc etc. Only in France, I'm inclined to think, would you end up in a discussion with a group of bin men on the gastronomic properties and virtues of medlars. I scooped up another armful and tossed them into my basket in the car, and we went on our way, the bin men giving me a merry bip and a wave as I passed them.

The foraging bit between my teeth, I decided to stop at the sawmill and fill the boot with offcuts for firewood. If you stop on the opposite side of the road from the mill itself, and only take from the piles of oddments, not the tied together bundles, it's free. It's well seasoned and sometimes there are some very nice chunks. It's a bit grubby but my car's used to it.

That done, I walked Mol down the avenue of poplars and turkey oaks approaching the château of Bogard, then rang Tom to put the kettle on. Just as I was approaching Beau Soleil, I thought the final cherry on the cake, as it were, would be to pick up one of the delicious-looking rosy apples that had been dropping on the verge there all this autumn to munch on the last leg of the journey home. I pulled over, left the engine running, shut the door behind me, ran across the road, picked up three apples, ran back... and couldn't open the car door.

I had shut the buckle of the seat belt in it. This happens quite frequently, perhaps because of the two-door Saxo's design, perhaps because I have to have my seat a long way forward, or perhaps, as was pointed out subsequently by our friendly, treasured, but sometimes annoyingly know-it-all garage man M Turbin, because there is a rather clumsy velcro-attached thing on the belt to pad it against your shoulder, put there by the somewhat large people who had the car before me and which I've never taken off, which stops the belt from rolling back properly and makes it hang awkwardly. Hwever, it has never before resulted in jamming the mechanism of the door handle.

Everything, except for me and the apples, was in the car: keys, bag, mobile, Molly... the engine was running and the passenger door was locked. The woman whose apples I had scrumped at this point leaned out of her window and looked curiously at me.

'I have a problem.' I told her.

It was my greed (gourmandise, not quite greed as we scarcely reconstructed protestant Anglos know it, but I'll save the comparative semantics for now) that has caused this, I confessed, I was stealing your apples. This didn't seem to worry her, fortunately.

'Hold on a minute and I'll get a wire.' she said, and came down with an unravelled coat hanger. This didn't work. Her arm was thinner than mine and she was nearly able to reach the button of the passenger door but not quite. Molly barked a bit but happily didn't attempt to savage her, and let her stroke her nose through the opening. Then she she said

'What about the boot*?'

Why hadn't I thought of that? Of course. I opened the boot to reveal my haul of scruffy firewood. Poor Englishwoman, she must have thought, reduced by the dismal exchange rate and the dwindling value of their savings to gathering old bits of wood and nicking apples.

'Would you like me to climb in?' my saviour asked kindly. I assured her I could do it, scrambled in ungainly fashion over the wood and the back seat and asked her please to close the boot behind me. The door proved to open perfectly well from the inside, the engine smelled a bit warm, Molly was pleased to see me and the tea was well brewed when I got in. I confessed my sorry tale to Tom, who said 'Serves you right for scrumping', which Adam might well have said to Eve, I suppose.

Unfortunately, the door handle is broken, and M Turbin can't fix it till Tuesday, as he and all his suppliers are 'making the bridge' - taking a long weekend around a public holiday, so I am having to open the passenger door and lean across every time I want to get into the car, which is slightly less undignified that clambering in the boot. All my frugality will be set at nought against the cost of the repair, I dare say, though our gallant garagist will always try to get a cheap salvaged part for us, which probably means I'll have a pillar box red door handle on my bottle green car, further to remind me of my folly (actually he said he's spray it for me if that happened, and perhaps it wouldn't be necessary if he could just rehook the mechanism, so fingers crossed).

Anyway, here are the medlars.

After research into the bletting process, I have arranged them on straw in an old winebox under cover in the woodstore, so I'll keep you posted as to their progress.

* trunk, if you're American. This post seems to be one that almost requires a glossary.

2011-11-10T23:18:00.000+01:00

Well, I can't quite think what I was going to blog about today. Medlars again perhaps, and other scrumping related tales, or perhaps about getting my hair cut today in a different shape. What, the imminent collapse of the Eurozone and its repercussions, did you say, or the latest on Iran's nuclear capacity? Nah, what do you think I am, a serious blogger with intelligent observations to make or something?

Anyway ( to use an over-used adverbial tag), whatever it was I meant to show-and-tell you about will have to wait, because Tom said there was a full moon tonight so let's go to the beach and look at the sea under it, so we did, taking back some fleecy shirts which were too small to Leclerc on the way as a sort of attempt to justify a totally gratuitous pleasure trip (only it turned out Leclerc wasn't really on the way at all so we drove much further than we probably would have done if we'd just made two trips). We asked Leclerc if they had any sack cloth and ashes we could change the shirts for but they were fresh out of those so we just got some bigger shirts, grey check fleece chockful of winter warmth, for Tom really, as we worked out he's been wearing the same two fleece shirts for fourteen winters now, but I've sort of got my eye on them for a borrow. There were red ones and purple and rust too but Tom's not a great one for colourful checks.

Then we went on to Morieux, to the cove at Béliard. We'd checked the tide tables (always to hand here, even before there was the internet), and we know the tide would have turned at 6.40 and it was just a bit after 7.00, so the sea was a swirling misty grey void below us, but it was racing back quickly and already by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs down the cliff there was enough beach for us to walk all the way along to just below the chapel at St Maurice. The moon hadn't shown up so far but it was light enough with just the torch to steer us round the rocks and Molly on her long lead. And when we got back to the car I'd packed a thermos of mulled wine (some old Bordeaux that wasn't up to much before the addition of orange peel, cinnamon, cardamon and coriander seeds and sugar), and we leaned on the car bonnet and looked out across the bay and finally the moon made an appearance from behind the clouds, and we drank from some little brown Japanese teacups without handles which spend most of their lives containing leftovers in the 'fridge but which have in fact been waiting all this time to have mulled wine in them by the seashore on a moonlit night in November.

Then we came home to slow-cooked ox tail and shallots and chestnut and white bean (mogettes de Vendée) and garlic purée and I lit a fire of offcuts and pine cones even though it wasn't really cold, and we finished it off with some After-Eight mints someone brought round a bit ago. And it was a completely perfect evening and all's right with the world, which of course it isn't but what that means is, just for now and ignoring all else, all's right with me.

So I haven't got so much as a picture to post here, I'm afraid. But there's always tomorrow

Two Little Sausages: a family heirloom

2011-11-09T21:56:00.002+01:00

My mother was known for her repertoire of comic songs, the kind of thing to entertain her offspring on long car journeys. Brother Phil's and my favourite was, I seem to recall, one called The Body in the Bag about a man who had to bury a dead cat. Sounds macabre? Don't worry, it all turns out all right in the end (the link is to a set of lyrics, one of the very few internet references I could find to that one).

My twin nieces, however, my sister Helli's girls, who used to spend their summers for several years at our parents' house in Brighton, had a thing about a song Mum sang about two little sausages, a tale of star-crossed love and happy endings among charcuterie folk. They made her sing it over and over (she was nothing loath) until they had it off by heart as well as she did. Being twins, shared things, jokes, songs, memorised repartee, have great sticking power with them. They carried The Sausage Song around with them into adulthood, after Mum died, until the internet came along and enabled them to rescue it from the fragile oral tradition, locate its place in history, and reconstruct any words missing from the fossil record. Though the form they learned it in, along with any errors it may contain, is dear to them as 'the way Grandma sang it', so many corrections have not been made. It has long been a party piece of theirs, and as it is in fact a duet the form suits them.

It's actual provenance is from a musical comedy of multiple authorship of 1907, seven years before my mother was born, called The Girls of Gottenberg, It only had a short run so where she heard it we don't know, except her brother had a gramophone and records. Fifty years later she was still singing it to the twins.

Thirty years on, one of them now lives in Australia, the other, who I saw last month, in England. Bee, the Australian twin, decided during a recent get-together that it was time her partner, cousins - my sister Alison's three children - and their partners were initiated into the joys of Two Little Sausages, and a performance was devised, arranged, videoed and sent to her sister, who shunted it over onto my laptop when I was there ( by means of a USB key in the shape of a dinky toy Land Rover, which is another story). So the Two Sausages live on, for as it says in the final lines of the song

... on any day you'll meet'em
for there's no one wants to eat'em

The video is, of course, daft as a brush - it's only a truncated version of the first verse and very short, all the lyrics can be found here, and an MP3 of the tune can be heard if you go to this page and click on no.20, if your interested and find the song as delightful and amusing as we do, which you might not, but the words are funny, and perhaps it's something other people remember, I'd be interested to know.

I just find it rather marvellous that a silly song from more than a hundred years ago was preserved in one child's memory into old age, handed on to two other children who kept it until the internet came along, and it can now be seen and heard being sung by a motley collection of 20 to 40 year olds, naturalised and native Australians, New Zealanders and Spanish, boat builders, airline workers, psychotherapists and hotshot young academics.

So I give you Bee, Hywel, Hamish, Mikey, Isabelle, Elen and Bel * with Two Little Sausages, courtesy of their late grandmother Marjorie.

* Hywel, Isabelle and Elen are Alison's children, Mikey is Bee's shaggy boatbuilder, Hamish is Elen's other half, and Bel is Hywel's lovely Spanish girlfriend.

Poetical friends

2011-11-08T21:31:00.001+01:00

I've really rather a lot of these, but this is about just two of them for now.

First, Plutarch has replied to my question about following swallows over at Compasses.

... to follow the most delicate of birds, which drinks
as it skims the water, crosses oceans and continents,
feeds on flies, perches on telegraph wires
like musical notations, knows where to go, where to land
and when. Its nests are mythic architecture.

His poem is called A ball of string, so as you might imagine not only swallows but other themes emerge. It's a beautiful, visionary poem which sweeps broadly through time and space, to the edge of clouds and down into labyrinths, belying the human limitations he laments. To me it forms a fine diptych with one he recently had published in Qarrtsiluni, where he posits that

To monitor the flight of birds
in consideration of what is received
(for which we should be truly thankful),
to count and name their variations,
their prey and predators,
is reason enough to be on Earth.

I'm inclined to agree.

Second, these came in the just the other day:

I've corresponded with and come to know and love Teresa and her work for a year or so now. I have both her previous books of poems, and found them wonderful, and when she asked me if she could have a photo she saw here for the cover of her next, Itching, itching, I was honoured and delighted. I've been waiting for my copy impatiently.

In the first poem there is an artist, who

took pain and shaped a vision

and this is what Teresa does. There are a number of artists in these pages, like the metal artist, who

labors

into the night, twists

the thin strands, presses

with tools of mysterious use

and who

rubs

shine back into the hammered medallion

of blackened silver

There is music, too, especially jazz, woven through her writing everywhere, a kindred spirit appears unexpectedly 'to borrow earphones' and then stays, in a sensual encounter, incidentally there is 'Mingus in the other room', and elsewhere

chords

that thumbed the G, spun it straight in

to hope's solar plexus

This kind of music seldom exactly has savage-beast-soothing charms, though; like the love and passion of which it forms a part it is often a lacerating, flaying experience, so a man's 'easy singing'

rusts a scream onto bare arms

There are moths and a sinister, metaphorical cat, there is raw physicality in plenty - chests, throats, teeth, bones; we find ourselves up at 3 in the lonely morning more than once. This is pain-filled stuff indeed, (more so than in her two previous volumes, I would say) but love is also exalting and exulting, even if it is absence and loss which reveals this; the voice of the beloved lost brother to whom the book is dedicated

... splashed

down the channels of my ears...

and she longs to hold on to

everything you ever touched, the golden light that rests

on places where your arms passed through.

Time and tide only increase the store of beauty of those we love -

nieces came

and went, growing lovelier with the storms

(how I love that one!)

This often isn't easy writing, but so what? It is sometimes hard to follow, as in the appositely titled An upside down vision, you -

... lapels flying and clean grin
for friends, lover mother, then wavering
at the edge like reed, windblown
a whole block of flats, shimmying in streetlight,

but syntactical ambiguity can express and enrich a complex emotional landscape.

And sometimes it's hard to confront such an onslaught of intense, sometimes violent, synaesthetic sensory impressions, the omnipresence of pain and shadow and the lightning flashes of ecstasy, which are in essence a refusal to experience life by any half-measures, no matter how much it hurts.

The title poem starts with the poet

At the sink in nettles to my elbows

which makes one wince, of course, but it is the sting, the itch, the pain, the acid taste of

... still-warm rhubarb that sets my teeth on edge

which needles and drives and provokes the creative act;

searching a stony streambed, we seek the heart

of all that water, the salt and darkness, the emptiness

that billows jewelled nets strung from every part

of this place where nothing misses me.

If I didn't know her a bit, and if I didn't know enough to know that one need not confuse the writer with the places where they take you, I might worry about Teresa. But that kind of worrying about can be a sign of smallness, resistance, jealousy even; that I can't quite go to those places on my own, but need her to take me there. It is a privilege to share something of the vision and experience of someone who has

...yew

along the front path, violets down deep, forsythia, mint she'll never

be free of, bleeding heart, the sounding out of poems fresh

and mysterious, a source she'll never tire of sipping.

I hope she never does tire of it.

(Itching, itching is published by Finishing Line Press )

Beech nuts

2011-11-07T22:50:00.005+01:00

While finally getting around to putting away the t-shirts and shorts and getting out the woollies and fleecies I caught BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme, which was about wild food and foraging for it. It is, in a small way, a thriving business, with dedicated and knowledgeable foragers with long client lists of top chefs and restaurants who are just queuing up to buy not only wild mushrooms, always sought after and paid handsomely for in most of Europe though not until recently by the wary British, but stuff like hogweed seeds, goosegrass, and even pine needles - used as an aromatic and infused into sugar, among other things; Heston Blumenthal was going on about how he dusts it onto mince pies in an ad for Waitrose the other day. A little while ago someone was telling me about how they'd stopped at a fashionable and well-reviewed restaurant on a UK holiday and eaten nettle soup with snails in ( on purpose, apparently, not because they'd omitted to wash them off the nettles), something with wild garlic, I think, followed by deep fried sand eels.

I have long been an inveterate forager. Richard Mabey's Food for Free has been a vade mecum for me for a very long time, I got my first copy of it out of the library in my early teens and have scarcely ever been without it. Richard Maybe was on the programme, speaking intelligently about the difference between the hobby foraging of today and the necessity of supplementing diet and income which had driven it in former times. He applauded the chefs and foodies and professional foragers for exploring it and reviving the interest, and for getting people back in touch with nature and natural food.

Yet, call me a grousing malcontent, but something about this rankles with me. Perhaps it's just the kind of resentment one tends to feel when one has always enjoyed something but rather been looked askance at and considered eccentric for it, then suddenly it becomes fashionable and everyone is indiscriminately jumping on the bandwagon. And it is indiscriminate; I've eaten a lot of this stuff, some of it's good, some delicious, other things you'd really only bother with if you were in imminent danger of demise from starvation, or scurvy at least. There are good reasons why humankind selected certain plants over others and developed them to grow bigger and better. It seems to me the current gastronomic wild food craze is a kind of faux frugality, flirting with back-to-nature, a pose, Marie-Antoinette playing shepherdesses, and in the end all about novelty - we've eaten every kind of exotica flown in from everywhere and our palates are jaded, bring us coarse weeds from the hedges to tickle them, we'll pay good money and drive our 4-wheel-drives many miles to get them...

For all the Athenians and the strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear of some new thing...

Decadent. When I went to look up a link for Mabey's Food for Free, the first search result that came up was for an organisation of the same name which seeks to redistribute the enormous amounts of waste in from modern food outlets. This in America it's true, but waste is endemic everywhere, playing at self-sufficiency and eating from the hedgerows doesn't really address that; true frugality would be better served by wasting less, indeed, by eating less, by doing with gluts and doing without, not chasing around after something different all the time.

But no, this won't do, grousing malcontent indeed. Better the hirsute foragers, who do no harm to the environment they forage, than mange-tout flown in from Kenya, and I don't think anyone's pretending it's really contributing to sustainability. And I'm just as bad myself. I like to think that my foraging is about developing skills of identifying and preparing wild food, and a way of making the best of being, relatively speaking, time-rich and cash-poor, as gathering and picking over and processing takes time, but it's really just for fun, playing around and trying to be different, which is probably why I'm cross about other people doing it too - I enjoyed being seen as a bit quaint. And I'm very aware that while my jams and syrups and liqueurs may be from fruit and flowers from the hedgerows, but the sugar and booze comes courtesy of the wicked multinationals and their cash crops; the the herbs and leaves might be out of the fields and banks where the wild thyme blows but the olive oil they're dressed with cost money from the other kind of bank and came quite a long way to be here. And I'm hooked on trying new things too.

Never mind, I'll go on fiddling in my own way while Rome burns, and lucky I am to be able to do it.

All of which is a long and grumpy preamble to the original matter of this post, which is proof positive that I really must have too much time on my hands (I don't really, I just distract myself with trifles while the floor goes unswept and the dog unbrushed).

Beech nuts.

Chestnuts and oaks are the predominant broad-leaved deciduous trees in these parts, but there are a few beech trees about too, and for the first time I can remember I noticed this year that the little triangular, three husked nuts, or mast, were unusually plump, and on closer examination, they proved to contain actual nutty little nuts - usually they are empty. So while Molly mooched around in one of her favourite Stations of the Mol, a lay-by under a large beech tree in the woods above Quessoy, (she often doesn't care much to go for a proper walk in these places, but barks as we approach them, even when she has been apparently fast asleep until that moment, and likes to potter round in circles indefinitely) I gathered a handkerchief full of beech mast and took it home to experiment with.

In fact I couldn't find much positive about beech nuts as a food crop, they were generally left for the pigs to munch on, or made into oil. They have a high oil content and it keeps well. They tend only to fruit this abundantly about every four years.

As I had done with the seeds I'd salvaged from a pumpkin, I left them on the kitchen counter and shelled them in dribs and drabs just with my nails as I was passing. You can get through quite a lot that way.

I have chosen in the name of honesty not to crop out the box of Cabernet d'Anjou or the jar of boiled sweets, just to prove I am no earthy purist in food matters, but really have quite low tastes.

The nuts are perhaps a centimetre long, and covered in a brown skin. They may be a bit high in tannin for comfort it seems, so the skin needs to come off.

The first lot I toasted skin-on,

rubbed the skin off in the palm of my hand a few at a time while they were hot and blew on them to winnow them. It felt nice.

The second lot I blanched with hot water like almonds, which is quite quick, and then toasted after.

I thought the first method was probably best, they seemed to toast more evenly and the flavour was better. Like most nuts and seeds they're tastier toasted.

My plan was to make a kind of pesto with them, with the basil that won't stop growing on the windowsill, and the pumpkin seeds and some small but very nice walnuts also foraged from a tree by where our friends used to live. Their neighbour, since deceased, used to carefully gather the walnuts and clean them all and put them in wooden boxes and give them away to anyone who wanted them, now I just pick a few up if I'm passing. However, the three-seed collection was so nice as it was, I've just been keeping them to one side and scattering them on salads as and when.

Probably not really worth the bother, but interesting anyway!

Bless thee Shakespeare thou art translated...

2011-11-06T23:43:00.001+01:00

Left myself short of time again, yet I'm still enjoying daily postings. There seems quite a bit of it going on this year, even if not everyone's all signed up officially for it, something of a resurgence of blogging motivation, which is good to see, even when it means the sidebar feed is changing its configuration faster than I can keep up with it.

A dull grey day today, and this afternoon I trotted along to the unfortunately acronymed CAC ( think it stands for Centre d'acceuil culturel, not quite sure, it is to be found above what used to be the Spar supermarket and is now a state of the art Carrefour minimarket) in Moncontour to meet J and E, who had agreed to come along to see Le TrUC, an am-dram group from Rennes in a French language version of A Midsummer Night's Dream ( Un Songe d'une Nuit d'Été). Ok, you can smile, how desperate does one have to be to get out more? I had until now sworn off any small scale French language theatricals once and for all since being taken, some ten years ago now, to see a production of something in a village theatre resembling a tin can with old cinema seats ( actually it wasn't badly equipped really) with a convoluted plot involving a woman from the provinces who inherits a town property which unbeknownst to her is really a brothel but then the girls turn out to be spies but then the woman herself turns out to be the top spy, or something like that. It's probably some classic of French popular comedy which I shall now be berated for my cultural ignorance for not knowing about but I only remember it as one of the most interminable and excruciating evenings I have ever spent. I didn't have my own transport and was really almost in tears of desperation by the time we finally got away. After that it was music, dance or, at a pinch if Iso and Pascal are in them, mime performances only, with a time limit, and strict insistence on one's own transport and the possibility of a quick getaway.

But I was so surprised to see a big banner for MSND and thought, why not, if they can take the trouble to come out here and put it on I can at least give it a go, and since the ins and outs of the play and quite a few of its speeches are probably about as familiar as anything could be, and since I'd a reasonable idea of its likely duration, it couldn't be too unendurably incomprehensible. Surprisingly I even found two other people prepared to turn out with me. It was on last night and this afternoon, with about 30 odd people in the audience and the same the night before, which might have only been about three times the number of people involved in the production but also probaly constituted about half of the compos mentis, ambulant population of Moncontour, so not bad.

And in truth it really wasn't bad. It was too long; bits of it dragged rather and were spun out unnecessarily, especially the bits with the lovers, and it occurs to me that they're probably often rather tiresome. T he rude mechanicals ended up making us laugh quite a lot in Pyramus and Thisbe, but their rehearsals were weirdly halting and uncertain, and Bottom translated was too fearful and pitiable for my taste, he ought to have a really good time being petted and lusted after by Titania and run around after by Pease Blossom et al. Titania was rather good, tall and slinky in thigh boots and a mini-skirt. All the fairies were good, camp and wacky and enjoying themselves in all kids of coloured tulle and roller skates and other bits and pieces. Though Oberon was somewhat declamatory, the young woman who was Puck was the epitome of Puckishness and very watchable, and generally they could have cut a lot more of the tedious lovers and kept in more fairy stuff.

So much for the action, but what about Shakespeare in French? I don't know, it seems a truism to the point of the bleedin' obvious to say it should be in the original, but then again, if you aren't English speaking what do you do? I recognised much of it but it seemed unrecognisable, I had hoped it would be a different music but it seemed sadly unmusical, but that might be a lack in me. I know there's a worthy tradition of French translation of Shakespeare but don't know enough about it to be discerning.

Glad I went though.

A few more pictures from the same morning as the liquid amber ones.

Still life and woodpecker

2011-11-05T22:58:00.000+01:00

Oh my, I am tired. Been doing this and that all quite interesting but left me no juice left to write about any of it.

Here's a still life, because where there's still life there's still hope.

Some if it was scrumped, some otherwise serendipitously acquired, some just bought. Scrumped included the medlar, which is useless since it is not yet bletted. I thought I had found the last word on medlars here,(and the source of another wonderful and enriching on-line friendship), but then there was this post at twisted rib just the other day, which is amazing and hilarious and somewhat filthy and in places oh so right (DHL, looking at you and it's true I'm afraid even though you did write Bavarian Gentians, and The Song of a Man who has Come Through, and Shadows ...)

Then there was this fellow who came and alighted in the eucalyptus and shouted and yaffled 'IT'S GOING TO RAIN!!!' for a full couple of minutes before flying off and he was right, it did.

And now I really must go to bed.

Sheila's cotton

2011-11-04T22:35:00.001+01:00

A beautiful thing arrived today.

Sheila lives in Memphis and blogs at Folk, Flocks and Flowers. She loves... well, she just loves, but all sorts of things, music and words and birds and flowers and Italy, (she lived there for years and speaks fluent Italian, can even give lectures in it); she loves her friends and her family and Drazen her husband (who's Croatian, she speaks Croatian too) and her dogs who have the fabulous names of Pablo and Tosca. She is beautiful and talented and courageous and rich in faith and hope and love One day she'll come and live in Europe, in Croatia, and then she'll be just sort of down the road, and we are going to sit in the sunset together when we are old ladies.. She's been a has been a faithful blog friend to me for years now, and we e-mail and sometimes snail-mail.

So quite out of the blue, though the elegant italic script on the envelope looked instantly familiar, a big jiffy bag arrived this morning. Inside was another envelope with my initials exquisitely cut-out and stuck on it, a card and a letter, and another box which had once contained cranberry and orange biscotti, and inside that were...

cotton bolls!

Where Sheila lives they grow cotton, of course. One day they were driving past a big field of it and she thought how lovely it looked, and surmised quite rightly that I would not be familiar with the sight of a field of cotton in its glory, and decided that she'd rather like to share something of the experience with me, so she got Drazen to stop, jumped down, turned around and picked a boll of cotton (or two), and sent it to me.

I just think this is magical, just to think to pick up, without harm or damage to anything, a little, simple piece of the world around you and share it with someone thousands of miles away to whom it is new and unfamiliar. We all ought to do things like that more often. Bless you, Sheila, as I'm blessed to have such people in my life.

There once was a dormouse...

2011-11-03T21:38:00.007+01:00

... who lived in a bed,
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)

Jean very reasonably remarked after I wrote about my rejection of Blogger's new interface that it looked quite harmless, and asked what I didn't like about it.

Well, to be honest, I think it's mostly that it isn't the old one, and I am a stick-in-the-mud after all! But I'll try to justify myself as reasonably as possible.

I think it looks very wishy-washy and faint in appearance, especially using the small notebook computer, and I don't care for the orange, I don't mind orange as a colour really, but don't much like it here. I like the bold blues and blacks and big clear buttons on the old one. I prefer the row of tabs along the top to the vertical list down the side, and the fact that they're accessible on all the blogs on my dashboard at once (I'm not alone in running more than one blog). I find I prefer words to picture icons - the little pen nib for 'post' etc - for operations too. Yes, I know text appears when you hover the pointer but I prefer to see it instantly, thank you.

I like the old 'new window'(which using Chrome comes out as a new tab) option on the dashboard for viewing the blog. Yes, I know that it isn't really necessary to open as a new page at all but I like to be able to look the blog but keep the dashboard in place, rather than keep having to navigate back and forth. And I know that one can do so easily enough with a right click, but, again, I like having it given to me on a plate.

I do in fact quite like the post editor in the new interface, as it's wider and clearer, except for that thing with the labels-and-other-stuff options on it that keeps popping out from the right uninvited and getting in the way.

Despite what they say I can see no difference in the loading speed, which was perfectly satisfactory anyway.

But probably the real reason I don't care for the change is that I've known the old interface for so long, and it was one of the first computerish things I ever got familiar with, and I've got certain ways of doing things and little personal procedures that are kind of dear to me even if they aren't always the most efficient way, and which just don't seem the same with the new one. I didn't actually mean to switch back, in fact, since I'd put my hand to the plough and I generally think if you have to get used to something new it's better to do it sooner rather than later, but I kind of did it by accident, and when I saw the old dashboard again I felt such a rush of sentimental affection and of being pleased to see an old friend I decided to leave it there!

Julia doesn't like the new one either either, and she's a software whizz so that makes me feel a bit better!

The new gmail format is quite similar and I don't care for that either, with lots of complicated separate scrolling bits and pictures instead of words on the buttons, and all rather scribbly and faint and messy, and the italicisation/emboldening thing doesn't work (yes, I do use keyboard shortcuts, but it's a bit retrograde isn't it?). Further, there seems to be a bridge-burning catch built into switching to that, and once done there's no going back, so I'll have to put up with it now. I leaned over Tom while he was grumbling about it today, and he decided to leave feedback on the matter. I had declined to bother with this, as I would only spend far too long trying to clarify my objections in my computer illiterate vocabulary to surely no useful end. However, he wasted time on no such conciliation and reasonableness, and just answered the question What do you like about the new gmail interface? with the response Nothing, and to the question What do you dislike about the new interface? he answered Everything. That's my reactionary old git, I thought proudly.

Really though, I don't think I'm too stubborn and inflexible about change in this area, I didn't mind the post editor changes a while back once the picture upload started to work properly (which it only did when I used a newer computer, but I worked round that problem using Picasa albums). In a wider case, I still use XP on the Notebook but am happy to switch back and forth between that and Windows 7 on the main one. I generally get used to things and appreciate the benefits after a bit, but it seems to me that if after a month or more I rush back into the arms of an older system and look of things with nothing but relief it can't only be me ... Can it?

The Dormouse looked out, and he said with a sigh:
"I suppose all these people know better than I.
It was silly, perhaps, but I did like the view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)."

Apologies for the lack of techno-vocab in this, all these thingies and whatsits don't read very clearly, but I don't really speak the lingo very well and am afraid if I try I'll only say something stupid and expose myself yet more thoroughly for the helpless numpty I am..

(If you don't know the dormouse poem ~~what kind of upbringing did you have for heaven's sake?~~ please do follow the link and read it, it's such a gem.)

(That was really just an opportunity to use the struck-out text thing, which I never have before. I do know not everyone was brought up in cosy-English-middle-class-home-counties-A.A.Milne-land. But read it anyway.)

Anyway, very apposite that I should do a meta-blogging post today, even if it is a grumpy one, as today is Box Elder's 5th birthday! Don't know where the time's gone, they grow up so fast don't they ...

In celebration here are five instances of the number five.

St Quay Portrieux, with dogs and teapots.

2011-11-02T23:00:00.000+01:00

Well, the notes I've been shuffling about the matter of Rilke's window poems and my attempts at translating some of them need further shuffling together with typing up the originals, so here are some whimsical photos taken on a trip over to St Quay Portrieux .

Champagne on the rocks, with labrador.

A gentlemanly Jack Russell, with a leg at each corner.

Looking out to sea, waiting for our tea.

Dogs matching trousers.

The boyhood of teapots, as they gaze wistfully out at larger vessels who go abroad and see the world.

I am delighted unto pieces that the incomparable Luisa Igloria has been quietly storing up the matter of this post here, among other things, for wonderful imagery in a poem for All Souls week.

I had soldiered on with Blogger's new interface for at least a month, far be it from me to be a stick in the mud, but then with enormous relief I flipped back to the old one the other day, and will stay with it until forced to do otherwise. It was just so nice to see it again.

Liquid amber

2011-11-01T21:52:00.000+01:00

I thought the sun was waiting for me
at the top of the road. But when I got there
it was already in a clinch
with an autumn-coloured garden tree.
I caught them in flagrante, glowing
with each other's touch. Liquid amber.
Shameless.

Reflections on the season, and all that.

2011-10-31T23:59:00.002+01:00

A perfect All Hallows Eve, we drove up to the coast and walked, watched a surprisingly surfy sea for the Bay, little spray-topped curling waves and a collection of kite surfers enjoying them, their kites bowed over like herons' wings.

On the way, raggedly effusive reds and pinks of lingering geraniums, petunias and roses embroidered the backdrop of gold-brown-yellow-orange leaves. Where have the field maples been until now, how is it they only become visible in autumn? The shimmery, sandalled verticals of the poplars are best of all though. I know Tolkien divides people fiercely, but I hold to the middle ground, or sit on the fence if you like; I remember someone saying about Wagner that, all his sins notwithstanding, he sometimes entertained angels unawares, and that's rather how I feel about Tolkien*. I can't look up into autumn-turning poplar woods without the word Lothlorien speaking itself to me.

We'd cried off a dinner date for this evening and have relished the relief of doing so all day. I lit the first fire of the season - having cleared out the grate including a poor dead sparrow and the soot it had brought down with it - and soon was pulling off fleece and thick socks and experiencing delightful levels of warmth - we've turned our radiators on but are resolutely leaving the thermostat at 18˚, and so far they've barely come on, but it's started feeling slightly damp and chilly at times. I made a stewy-soup with chicken and butter-nut pumpkin and chestnuts and dumplings in it, among other things, and we were warmer still. And just before that there was some unaccustomed noise and commotion in the road, and peering out we saw some eerie small personages outside.

Now trick-or-treat may be commonplace for better or worse to most of you in the Anglo world, but here it's still not widespread. Some years I make pumpkin lanterns, and soup or pie from their insides, and our elderly neighbours used to look with bafflement on them in the window and remark that it was a bit early for Christmas, and they were equally nonplussed about the pie. Since the family next door (not Charmless, the other side) nearly broke our hearts a couple of years ago by moving away to live down the road in a big smart new house the bourg without saying goodbye, I haven't bothered putting the Jack O'Lanterns in the window, though I might put one on the hearth. They didn't slip off without saying goodbye ( filer à l'anglaise, as the expression goes) because they didn't like us, I'm sure, but out of a kind of shyness, a dislike of departure, not wanting to fuss, or upset the children, or something. But we were fond of them; Sarah used to come to the downstairs window sill when she was barely high enough to look over it and repeat 'Il est où, Tom?' so that sometimes Tom used to duck out of sight to be able to get on with whatever he was doing. We've seen them around since of course, and before they let it to the elderly lady who's there now, I asked Gwen, the mother, what they might do about the little old house which was still empty. She said that they weren't allowed to think of selling it as Sebastian, who's eleven, insists that as soon as he's old enough he's going to come back and live there, as he was so happy here.

But there on our doorstep were three wee horrors, Sebastian, Sarah and their cousin Laure, with a paper bag, big grins, wigs, hats and face paint. We made a show of astonishment and non-recognition and Sebastian, being in charge, hastily informed us that he was Sebastian, and this was Sarah. No, I said, that is a small witch. No, really, he said, it was Sarah, who opened her mouth to reveal vampire fangs, at which we squealed dutifully. I wished I'd made the butter-nut into a lantern.

Thankful for our boiled sweet habit, I dug into the jar and dropped a handful into the paper bag. They trooped off and Gwen, who was taxi-driving in the background, gave us a cheery wave and said that they knew they could come to us as we'd know all about it. We waved them off and told them what a pleasure it was to see them and how beautiful they were, and really meant it. We kept grinning about it for the rest of the evening.

* and all his angels notwithstanding, his poetry was truly awful.

Well, the first fire, Halloween, golden groves unleaving, and its the time of year for daily blogging again. I know a lot of people are sniffy about Nablopomo as a slavish following of what others begin, an affront to their freedom of spirit, last year's model, a grotesque acronym etc, but no one has to do it, and I enjoy the push to daily practice and the opportunity to use up odds and ends, so I'm giving it a go as usual. See you tomorrow.

(Window carving, Saffron Walden church. Apropos of nothing much.)

Windows again (looking out)

2011-10-29T19:29:00.001+02:00

Isn't it our geometry,
the window, the simplest shape
effortlessly drawn around
our enormous life?

The one you love is never lovelier
than when you see her
in the frame of a window,
made nearly timeless.

All risks are done away with. Being
stands at the heart of love,
with just this small surrounding space
of which you are master.

(Rilke, Windows III )

It's enough that, on a balcony
or in the frame of a window
a woman hesitates ...

... to be
the one we've lost
on having seen her once appear.

And if she should lift up her arms,
a delicate vase, to tie her hair:
how much our loss
gains sudden emphasis by that
and our misfortune brilliance!

(Rilke, Windows I )

(Looking out from a Costa coffee shop in Cambridge, thinking I'd been lugging the camera about but not taking many photos, so decided I'd try a bit of street photography through the windows. Kind of thing when Jean does it it looks full of mindfulness and atmosphere and possible meaning, when I do it it just looks like mucking about pointing the camera at random, which it is. But as Rilke keeps saying, things seen through a window...

The only person I reckon is really recognisable is my sister, drinking her coffee, so I hope this doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities on matters of privacy.)

More Windows

2011-10-26T21:30:00.002+02:00

Window, a measure of waiting,
filled up so many times,
when a life pours out and grows
impatient for another life.

You pull apart and pull towards,
changeable as the sea,
a glass where, suddenly, our faces mirror
themselves and mix with what we see there.

A scrap of freedom compromised
by chance's presence;
taken up by something that's inside us that levels
with the superfluity of what's outside.

(Rilke, Windows IV. My translation again. I'll get around to appending the originals at some point.

Photos taken from London Bridge. Not sure what the building is.)

'Today I'm in a window mood...'

2011-10-23T22:34:00.000+02:00

Today I'm in a window mood

where living seems only to look,

and every taste surprises me

as filling and as knowing as a book.

( Rilke, The Windows XII, my translation/version from the French, as I can't quite get on with Poulin's and there don't seem to be many others. I've got a bloody nerve. RMR wrote some 400 poems in French near the end of his life, after the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.)

- Photos - Saffron Walden and Cambridge.

Saffron Walden

2011-10-21T22:53:00.000+02:00

Saffron Walden is picture postcard pretty. So here are some picture postcard pretty pictures.

I took them really to show to Tom when I got home, but then thought I'd make a collage just to give everyone a taste of ye olde half-timbering, pargeting. warm brickwork, greensward churchyard etc. According to my niece, who lived there for a time, it gets surprisingly rough of a Saturday night, however.

Still, a nice thing about it is the Fry Gallery (good link, if you keep returning to the home page, they background image changes every time), which is a small but beautiful space chock full of things by the likes of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, which are so much in the cultural and visual idiom in which I grew up that even when I hadn't actually seen them before I felt like they resonated with some atavistic, DNA-based part of me. There's a small room off to one side that contains Festival of Britain china and shelves full of illustrated books such as the Shell Guide to Britain which quite create a sensory hallucination of slipping back in time to somewhere I never quite left.

That's my sister going through the prints.

Outside was a wall covered in variegated ivy,

complete with wagging butterflies, like in Intercession in Late October.

As any fule no, or could deduce, Saffron Walden is called that because they grew saffron there once. (But how many know that Croydon was also called after the autumn crocuses grown there for saffron, which pleased me because Charmless Dutch Bulb-growing Neighbour once pompously corrected me for referring to colchicum as autumn crocus, since, he said, they were unrelated. Or that saffron is to be found in cookery wherever the Phoenicians went, from Persia to Cornwall. Amazing what an upbringing immersed in Radio 4 and the Shell Guide to Britain can do for you...).

Anyway, the saffron crocus (colchicum) motif is to be found around the place in the town, from the crest with the three rather bizarrely heraldically rendered flowers in the top left of the collage,

to a rather handsome bit of woodwork, a rail and table, in the church, which is more elegantly autumn crocus-like.

Postscript: Thanks to Zephyr, who is unparalleled in matters horticultural, I must east humble pie with saffron (which wouldn't then be so humble, in view of the costliness of the spice). Colchicum, though called autumn crocus too, is not the flower from which comes saffron, but is in fact highly toxic. The saffron autumn crocus is a true crocus crocus sativa which looks a bit similar but has different leaves and growth habit. In fact I think that the church carvings look rather more like colchicum, so perhaps others have been confused too.

This also means Charmless was right. He often is, which is somehow serves to exacerbate his general annoyingness. Alas, I am not always a nice person.

Red bus lemon cupcake rose door white cats

2011-10-19T23:07:00.001+02:00

on London bridge

a hand with coffee

in Saffron Walden

Blue (and his brother Zig)

A mighty fine trip to the UK. While carrying the camera everywhere, I was often too busy enjoying myself to use it, and there were few paparazzi moments, but I'll post more over the next few days.

I have new glasses, including reading glasses, which I've not had before. I was taken to see War Horse without being told where I was going, met up with Tunbridge Wells' finest, and went to choral evensong at King's College Chapel,(yes I know I said I don't do congregations but this is a bit different) and more besides. As I say, spoiled rotten.

Cloisters and gift shops, and living with ambivalence.

2011-10-11T10:28:00.001+02:00

Well, I probably shouldn't have thrown in the glib remark about atheists and believers, it's the kind of thing I regret and want to take back immediately I've said it, the kind of thing that that can lead to a widening gyre of pointless qualification and rebuttal which is everything I want nothing to do with, and as if it matters. It compromises the ambivalent tension and wonderment of my agnosticism, long held carefully in healthy and creative balance, as I see it anyway, which probably sounds intolerably pompous.

Can you draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which you let down?

There are so many I care about and respect of so many persuasions, none of whom I wish to see on any kind of defensive. I have been so blessed and enriched in so many ways, and there are so many ways to be blessed and enriched. Trouble is, so many people are convinced there's only one way: their own.

Howsoever, I do spend quite a bit of our time exploring religious places. Not so many churches, not here anyway. English churches I still miss quite viscerally, but only when they were empty; the Tory party at prayer (still too true, in many areas) and congregations in general, always repelled more than they ever attracted. This is, of course, one of my many major stumbling blocks with exoteric religions that demand commitment to fellowship, community, gregarious people-personship and general galloping-about-doing-good, I'm well aware. Yet, though I was unbaptised in infancy, unchurched for all my upbringing and loudly and intolerantly rejecting of the small-town, socially preoccupied, unsearching Anglicanism of my schooling in adolescence, aesthetically, culturally and psychologically, the English mediaeval, swept out and trimmed, as well as vandalised, by the Reformation, emblazoned and overlaid and generally fannied up by the Victorians, and lovingly turned into heritage in our own time, is still a kind of home to me.

In contrast I find a lot churches here just plain grim, either decaying or overblown or both, their iconography alien and grotesque. I know there are a couple of dozen posts here tagged with the label churches, and going deep into the folk religion hinterland fascinates me, and then there was Chartres:

But one tower was great, was it not? O Angel, it was -

even beside you. Chartres was great

(Rilke, Duino 7)

But the long history of anti-clericism and separation of church and state, which by and large I support wholeheartedly in principle, has led to an uneasy and resentful unwillingness on both sides to cherish ecclesiastical buildings and art as heritage outside of their religious and political role, and also produced a series of grandiose church buildings from various times in history, from the Counter-Reformation to the 19th century and even later, which sought to reassert the church's power and win back the faithful, filled with overwrought and mawkish imagery to try to whip up their emotions, and which overreached themselves in the attempt, becoming under-used, ill-maintained and tawdry.

One such we found was the Abbaye de Paimpont

which is apparently esteemed by some but not by us. Paimpont might claim to be rather Brittany's Glastonbury, with its odd mix of New Age Arthurian and Catholic revivalist pilgrims, but Glastonbury it ain't. We stopped for an ice cream and moved on.

Our main focus on this trip, a Saturday afternoon drive into the interior, all the way over the border into Morbihan, was the Abbaye La Joie Notre Dame, a Cistercian convent where they make good chocolate. Religious communities do interest us, always have. We had our wedding bash at Emmaus House in Bristol, the sisters there were friends of ours at the time, and when we lived in Devon we lived near Buckfast Abbey, I did quite a lot of supply teaching at the Catholic primary school there (no problem for me or the management), and we used to buy honey and other things from the shop, though not the infamous Buckfast Tonic Wine, the bane of the homeless alcoholic community in Glasgow, it seems, which has always puzzled me. In Gloucestershire we enjoyed the bird gardens and hankered for the china they sold at Prinknash, where Tom's much loved friend and counsellor, a C of E ordained priest, lived in an adjacent bungalow.

(Can I just say at this point, that for all this and anything else I've said, I fairly much loathe the Catholic church and everything it stands for. I live, as I say, with ambivalence...)

La Joie was recommended to us by a very sweet lady dressed in a cotton shirt and glass beads of heavenly, belle verriere, blue, who made friends with us outside the Abbey of Timadeuc, some miles to the west, on another such trip. Timadeuc is a Cistercian monastery, architecturally austere, where they make very excellent cheese and fruit jellies, which was recommended by our dear old friend and stonemason Jean-Paul, who on the cusp of retirement has fallen in love with a large lady who has clearly done him a power of good. She is a magnetiseuse and guerisseuse, essentially a faith healer. She has cured him, he said, of all the ills that a life in stonemasonry and self-employment had left him with. When he said this, Tom posited that that may have been love that did that, and JP assented, that too. At weekends they too make jaunts into the interior, and she likes to visit Timadeuc to buy essential oils and cds of spiritual music.

You may see a theme emerging, along with friendship, the happy co-existence of the religious and monastic life with marketing and consumerism. It was ever thus, I think. Tom's son, who was for a while a very enthusiastic RC convert, said that Buckfast abbey in particular was known in those circles as Fast Buck Abbey. There now exists a special, Europe-wide 'Monastic' label for their products, which range from incense and essential oils and toiletries through every kind of comestible, cheese, wine, sweets, grains (hence the muesli), cakes, olive oil. They are of uniformly high quality, a little expensive, but I gain some satisfaction from the feeling, hopefully not entirely romantic and spurious, that I am buying a little outside of the system, and from people whose philosophy is to be, as far as possible connected with every stage of the means of production. Also, less worthily, coming from a culture where part of the point of any day out was to enjoy the gift shop and the tea rooms, I tend to find large tracts of France rather lacking in such facilities. This lack of commercialism is in some ways admirable, but I'm afraid it often leaves me with a sense that something is missing. The monastic gift shops are rather nice places to visit, even if much of their stock is actually olive wood rosaries and books about Catholic luminaries,and other things I don't want. Timadeuc's is especially beautiful, with polished wood rafters and lovely light, and the sisters and brothers who staff them seem to enjoy having the dispensation to chat with the customers. In addition to the muesli and some chocolate and fruit jellies at La Joie, I also found some very pretty hand-knitted items, and bought a Breton-style stripy jumper for our friends' new grandson and a wonderfully soft aubergine-coloured scarf for I know-not-who. I think they were being made and sold in aid of a new sister foundation in Madagascar, so let's hope they won't be displacing too many lemurs.

And by contrast with the decaying Baroque monstrosities of the older churches, there is clean, well-kept simplicity about the place.

The church was built in the 1950s, I think, by the monks of Timadeuc.

The presence everywhere of white symbolises the joy of the name ( I was amused and pleased to find white as the colour of joy confirmed by Rabelais!).

The gardens are very peaceful and lovely, with many fine trees, and pools of deep shade and bright light, including a splendid avenue of tall American oaks at the entrance.

You can't actually get to see very much of the overall site, which is extensive and includes a farm and a lake; it is after all a place of silence, work and withdrawal, and their commercialism and open welcome is within bounds. But what you can see is worth seeing.

I'm hurrying to get this done before my sister arrives bearing curtains, and then I go back with her for a few days to the UK, where all sorts of treats are planned, so garden photos from the sunny days will probably have to wait. I'll try to get some links into this for some of the places I've mentioned later, but now I must get on and tidy the house a bit!

More applish things for breakfast, and stranger fruit.

2011-10-07T23:10:00.000+02:00

Oh, I am so healthy. I don't really live on toast and marmalade and wine and garlic butter and potato gnocchi and boiled sweets (soft centred ones), I sometimes eat this puffed spelt muesli from the Abbaye La Joie Notre Dame.

(I may post more on the role in my life of religious communities as retail experience at another time, except by doing so I would quite possibly lose the respect of both people of established faith and convinced atheists - excuse me is there a difference? Except I often find the former more gentle and tolerant than the latter, only of course I live in Europe... enough, parenthetically, enough.)*

With this rare-varietal, cereal-based food, which also contains coconut and is reassuringly un-crunchy, I mix diverse things, such as chopped prunes, Medjoul dates, apricots or bananas, I'm nothing if not fusion - or perhaps that should be ecumenical - in my tastes. On this occasion I added more gift apples, this time sweet eaters from B the German Doctor (espoused to the Quiet American), with a little light muscavodo, some soya cream and, a last minute notion, a pinch of cinnamon. And very good it was too, in the blue green hand-thrown bowl which is one of my favourites.

With, of course milky coffee (Fair Trade Guatemalan at the moment, or is it Haitian?), and supplements: lots of B complex, probably so much that most of it passes through me without touching the sides, zinc, and most important of all, magnesium, which I swear by. and which also is to be found in spelt.

TMI, no doubt. So what did you have for breakfast? (Thereby confirming this blog's place in the division one banality stakes.)

These physalis fruit, I feel, deserve to be portrayed because they are things of quite spiritual beauty too. Discovered and purchased on a trip to Lamballe market, along with a bunch of earthy but not woody radishes, some gorgeously corrugated big tomatoes, a small aubergine with a long stem still attached, some dried butter beans which here rejoice in the name haricots de Soissons ( though that was the council that condemned poor Peter Abelard and his book, I still think it sounds better than butter beans...) and are quite hard to find, and a net of pink Roscoff onions. The physalis were grown by a lady selling organic stuff and she grew them herself in a polytunnel, which she said was the only way to ensure a long enough growing season. Tom was quite surprised one could eat them at all, as he assumed I had bought them purely for their beauty, which I might have done, if they didn't taste so very good too, and if the act of unwrapping them from their papery raiments and popping them in one's mouth wasn't so exquisite.

Well, that's a pot boiler of a post for the weekend, since though I have sorted through, shrunk and exported (oh hear me, you Trojans, your Blogger allowance will burn up before your eyes if you do not heed my words and shrink and export your photos... I have seen it!) the pictures I have just downloaded from the astonishing Indian summer we have just experienced, I ran out of steam and time to do any more with them just yet, so this will have to do for the moment.

And so to bed. Have a good weekend.

* In fact the abbey is a beautiful, graceful and warm place, which I'd recommend anyone to look in on, except very convinced atheists, I suppose.

Fruits of memory

2011-10-03T23:35:00.000+02:00

quelle est la force qui fait qu'elles soient rondes
ces pommes si bien en main rien ne déborde
mais rarement il advient qu'on les cueille
impeccables dans les airs avent leur chute

( Heather Dohollau, from Le Dit de Couleurs )

'Here are your apples,' said Heather 'don't forget them. T. picked them specially, they're not windfalls.'

They come from a tree which arches over her delightful walled garden, which isn't far from the centre of the town but where the loudest sounds are often those of seagulls in the distance from near the port or the bell of the sombre neo-classical church up the road or the occasional flutter of the collared doves in the apple tree itself.

T, her son, whisked in shortly after, and, when I thanked him, gave a quick gruff chuckle and his little-boat smile.

I've been eyeing up the apples for a little while, as to me they looked like they might be Bramleys, Bramley cooking apples are one of the things you just don't see here, but which were a seasonal commonplace of life in Britain. We had a tree in the garden of the house where I grew up. It was the apple tree, tucked away at the end of the garden beyond the caravan and the bonfire, on a raised piece of ground supported by chunks of flint and Hertfordshire puddingstone, in between which there were red ants nests - we knew every one. It was next to the raspberry canes and the compost heap and just before the ageing, snaking low brick wall which gave onto East's woodyard beyond.

The tree was in fact three stems, a kind of 'w' shape, just about possible to climb when I was small, and low-hanging so that it was easy to scrape one's scalp on it carelessly, or be swiped at by our ginger cat who became a merciless jaguar when overhead on a branch. In the spring it was thick with blossom, fragrant and always surprising. When my sister Az was in her teens and I was a young child she often used to draw it, and for a long time I had a small Scraperboard picture she made of a blossoming twig, but sadly I have it no longer, lost along the way.

Yet the tree was something of a disappointment to me when I was small. Raised on story books and readers containing romantic tropes of swings hung from the boughs of apple trees, and longing to be able to pluck a sweet and rosy fruit from our own tree and bite into it, the shape and low stature of the tree were unsatisfactory, and the huge, lumpy, light green Bramleys were all wrong: 'You can't eat them raw, they're cookers!'

And being an unsophisticated, sweet-toothed, spoiled brat, born post-rationing and used to fruit sweets and milk chocolate and orange squash (though I could eat the fresh raspberries till the cows came home), the apple pies and crumbles my mother made them into were not interesting either, and seemed sour; she probably didn't quite dare use the amount of sugar required really to make them palatable to us younger ones, so we doubtless got chocolate cake instead.

As I grew older though, and began to mess about in the kitchen (to call it 'learning to cook' would be to exaggerate my efforts at the time), I did enjoy making my own crumbles, using brown sugar and sultanas and perhaps some spices, and on warm late summer Sundays one year, I had a craze for making apple snow: whipped egg whites folded into sweetened apple purée, for which, with their even, white, rather dry flesh which softens and fluffs up on cooking, Bramleys are excellent. It was light and refreshing and genuinely quite a sophisticated dish. I can't have made it for well over thirty years now.

The bold green satin skin of the fruit among the leaves I came to see as beautiful too. I remember hearing or reading about a restored steam locomotive which was repainted in 'its traditional, apple green livery'; and the phrase made my mouth water and pucker at once.

So I grew to appreciate the necessity and goodness of cooking apples. Here though, there seem to be only eaters for sale or giving away (unless you count commercial Granny Smiths, which are supposed to be dual purpose, though to my mind neither fish nor fowl, so to speak, and not good for much), and out here in the countryside of course there are the various mongrel and wilding cider apples going begging in the hedgerows, small and hard and thick-skinned and full of tannins, though useful to add a bit of bite and pectin to jams and jellies and other preserves. The tree in Heather's garden seemed to offer the first real cooking apples I'd seen since leaving England. She is not certain that they aren't really Granny Smiths, and I haven't quite convinced myself that they are truly Bramleys, the colour and texture isn't quite right, but if they are they are Grannies then they are bigger and lumpier and of a far more interesting, tough and astringent flavour and texture than any you find in the shops. I have just cooked a panful into purée, and they certainly soften and fluff into the very pale green-gold softness that I remember.

Perhaps it is time to rediscover apple snow.

In which we continue our love affair with things aeronautical

2011-09-25T22:39:00.000+02:00

Tom's birthday often coincides with the weekend of the Journées du Patrimoine, (Heritage Days) a state sponsored initiative whereby paying museums and other sites of interest open their doors for free, and other places not normally open to the public make themselves so. This was quite clever of him, though not as clever as my youngest niece who emigrated to New Zealand in her childhood to find that her birthday coincided with Waitangi Day, so that for ever after she could be assured of a public holiday for it.

But we've had some good days out gratis in September, and if we are at Kerbiriou, as we have been for the last couple of years, Yvette and Paul always have a local paper with a list and articles about what's available on the days to look at over breakfast. Last year we sampled Morlaix museum and gallery which had a contemporary art expo on at the time, but I'm afraid the most memorable thing about the occasion was that I became rather impatient to leave and tried to do so by an emergency exit which set all the alarms ringing and a man had to come running to stop them and tell me off. We also went to a mediaeval festival at a château nearby, which was quite good.

This year though, the day dawned chilly and grey, and we didn't really fancy gardens or a reprise of the museum, but looking through the options in Ouest France for the area, I saw the naval air base at Landivisiau was open, with a selection of aircraft from the vintage to the latest jet fighters.

Now despite the fact that if Tom is asked, as he was by Barrett Bonden not long ago, about his time in the Air Force, he is likely to give a terse and unenthusiastic reply to the effect that it was mostly a story of years of frustration and boredom, it doesn't take much for his eyes and enthusiasm to kindle at the very thought of military aircraft, and for myself, since my adolescent dalliance with Biggles, I have always had a penchant for any kind of flying machine.

So the birthday outing was decided.

There were plenty of different flying things to look at,

of all shapes and sizes.

There were glossy smooth surfaces,

and rougher, more weather-beaten ones.

And there was a real live Rafale, the French answer to the Eurofighter, which really floated Tom's boat (or lifted his ailerons, or whatever), with a real live Rafale pilot, who looked like he might have just completed his final adolescent growth spurt, and who was very happy to enumerate, in delightfully careful English ('I have trained in the USA') the reasons his aeroplane whupped the ass of the Eurofighter in every possible way.

Tom was certainly fairly well sold. The other day I heard strange heavy metal sounds coming from the computer accompanied by gasps and exclamations. When asked he replied 'I'm watching a video of the Rafale taking off!'

For me, though, that these spiky-looking weapons platforms all bristling with their unfathomable killer technology don't do a great deal for me aesthetically (and I'm not up for arguing any moral points about modern warfare here); the only thing that really caught my eye was this screen in the front of the cockpit, with its dragon-fly iridescence.

So which was your favourite Thunderbird? Mine was, of course, Thunderbird 2, all lumbering and gentle and capacious, motherly, you might say.

Indeed, rather like this lovely beast, a Breguet Atlantic 2, (except sadly, unlike Thunderbird 2, it wasn't green).

I liked this plane so much, and took pictures of all sorts of bits of it from all sorts of angles,

including its innards,

We happily queued for quite a long time to see inside it, it is enormous and full of screens and knobs and buttons and seats and bunks and nooks and crannies (but I couldn't photograph anything inside), it needs a crew of at least 13, and it seems to me a wondrous and complex organism.

I also liked its charming and dashing flight engineer, who showed us the outside. Looking up into its workings, I asked him if he or anyone understood all of it, or did everyone who worked on it just know a part, and he looked dreamy and approving and said he felt he was just beginning to, that he had worked with this and only this plane for twenty years and he was still learning.

In fact the whole occasion was notable as much for the conviviality and charm of the people we met, from the pilots and engineers to the rangy and very young aviatrix from the local flying club who showed us the little WW2 era wood and canvas monoplane with a dashboard like a Morris Minor, to the naval officers who were clowning for the groups of kids, wrapped up against the cold and stoically eating their picnics, whom we sat with for our lunch - buns and hot chocolate in one of the hangars.

A remarkably enjoyable day out.

Small numbers of things around the Bay of Morlaix

2011-09-21T19:22:00.001+02:00

One drop of water in a field of cabbages.

Two new apples in the garden at Kerbiriou,

and two old boats at le Dourduff.

Three mushrooms (and I don't know how many islands).

Four by four by four.

Mollydays

2011-09-20T19:05:00.000+02:00

You are not leaving me behind, says Mol, I am posting myself on the luggage, on my own car bed.

In fact most of our luggage pertains to her. As well as her car bed there is her proper bed, with pillow. The violet coloured fleecy blanket on top of our (single, small) suitcase is the one which we have to have to spread on our bed so she can come up and join us when we have tea in the morning (don't tell the B&B and gîte owners where we stay, at least we try to save their beds from dog hair). As well as this there is her food, bottles of water to go in the car, her bowls to eat and drink out of, her brush, her towels in case she gets wet, her ear and eye drops, pain killers in case she twists or sprains anything or gets ear-ache, her healthy treats and the carrots she has bits of when we have our early evening drink. Have I left anything out? Oh yes, car lead and two extending leads.

Anyway, she certainly enjoys it when we get there. You can tell because she does this a lot: what we call Doing a Mad Dog, which involves rolling around on her back waving her legs about and making very fearsome and gruesome noises. We respond by saying 'Have we got a Mad Dog? Mad Dog, Mad Dog!'

Sometimes she then gets a bit embarrassed and rights herself, especially if she thinks she might be being photographed.

Other times she doesn't and the performance moves on to a new phase. But I think I've said enough.

She makes us make ourselves ridiculous, we know.

More on the trip anon.

Flight 4: littoral

2011-09-14T21:35:00.001+02:00

And finally, more shoreline shapes.

So that's about it, I hope I've done it justice. I wanted to get it finished before our September trip to Kerbiriou for Tom's birthday, on which we are off tomorrow. I'm such a spoiled brat.

The full collection of photos from the plane trip is on Picasa web albums here.

Thanks again to BB and Mrs BB, and to everyone for such an enthusiastic response.

Back in a few days.

Flight 3: plotted and pieced

2011-09-14T21:26:00.000+02:00

As promised, more pictures patchworked.

Flight 2: miticulture

2011-09-13T18:32:00.001+02:00

I've long been somewhat aesthetically taken with with mussels and their cultivation, visual as well as gustatory; here's a previous photo post about them.

This went a stage further on looking down at the mussel beds from the air. We must have been quite lucky with the state of the tide, so that their serried rows hovered visible just below the surface in the aqua- and ultramarine of the bay, their graphic, human-ordered geometry offsetting the random figuring and curves of the rocks and shoreline.

I took a lot of pictures of these, and make no apology for including a lot of them here.

Studying the satellite imagery of the coast here also, it becomes apparent just how extensive the mussel fields are, miles and miles of inshore waters delicately striated with them. One tends to think that human dominion ends at the edge of the land, that the islands stand in untamed ocean where fishermen and mariners take their chances on the surface, whereas often they are almost joined to the mainland by areas of miticulture, plotted and marked out by human agency, made mysterious in their partial concealment by the rise and fall of the tide.

I've heard though, that shell fish in general and mussels in particular, as well as being good and healthy food are relatively sustainable and ecologically benign in their cultivation, especially compared with rapacious over-exploitation of totally wild fish species or other more toxic forms of fish farming, which I rather hope is true, as not only do I love eating them but find the sight of the mussel beds rather beautiful and fascinating.