Half a century and half a decade...

... which seems quite a lot of years. I am having a rather wonderful day, in fact.

My birthday treat was really to go to England last week, which was packed with activity and most enjoyable. I saw two siblings - lovely sister whom I stayed with and brother Phil too, and his Angela took the day off as well to come and meet us at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge (after a walk through the beautiful botanic garden), where we ate wild boar tortellini and cake in the café* and looked at the exhibition of medieval manuscripts, where I shadowed a very erudite lady who was commenting and explaining the exhibits to her companion in a most fascinating way, so I was moved to approach her before we left and thank her. I seem unable to stop myself speaking openly and probably inappropriately to complete strangers once in my native language; when I took my older French students to the south of England some years ago they kept asking if I was related to all the people we met as I seemed so familiar with them. We spent a day in London, had delicious vegetarian lunch at this restaurant, and took in more medievalia at the V&A along with a very absorbing exhibition on underwear since 1850. I also spent an evening with Tom's daughter K and her family, eating spag bol, being shown music videos and having the drop explained to me by my step-grandson, and I went food shopping in Lidl in Harlow which, bizarrely, provoked the strongest feeling of homesickness I experienced during the whole trip - I think it was brought on by the sausage rolls.

I took the camera but no photos whatsoever, even though I told lovely sister I'd photograph more of her quilts, I just forgot. But I did bring back these little fellows:

They are know as 'shelves', a portmanteau of shelf-elves, elves who sit on shelves. They are exquisitely made with felt hats and boots, knitting-Nancy (French knitting, tricotin) limbs and sheepskin beards, and filled with kiln-dried sand so their cone shaped bodies sit cosily and slightly mobile in the hand like Kelly men. No two are exactly alike. My sister has been creating so many lovely and immaculately made things and trying to sell them for a fraction of their worth for ages, and suddenly she's hit on something everyone wants. It seems there's a story book, though she didn't know about it, and a new custom that has grown from it, of parents moving the elf and hiding him in a different place round the house for the children to find every day in Advent. On account of this craze she has produced about 150 of them in about three weeks, and they are flying out of the small craft and gift outlets where she takes them. She still charges ridiculously little for them.

Anyway, despite having such a grand time, and despite Ryanair diverting the flight, because of fog which was nowhere to be seen on the ground at Dinard but was deemed by HQ in Dublin to be too severe to land there, so we had to wait around at Rennes for a couple of hours then be bussed back, it was lovely to get home. Elfie greeted me with equable but not overwhelming good humour, she'd had rather a nice time being spoiled by Tom and dragging him around the countryside, since he didn't dare let her off the lead he just followed her everywhere. She had a huge marrow bone to distract her the day I left (too much, she threw half of it up again but it didn't distress her), and was generally very good.

I haven't done anything special today, since there would be nothing open on a Monday in December and anyway, we had a firewood delivery. But Elfie and I had a lovely foggy morning walk, with a stripey partridge skittering away under her nose and getting her all excited, and two white egrets fishing in a puddle in the cow field below the house, who took flight and drifted off into the fog like spirits, and made the hair on the back of my neck rise. Our friend J rang and asked had I opened her present yet? She had said it was 'just a jokey one' which rather made my heart sink as J's jokey cards and presents are usually awful, and I'd put it away and forgotten about it. 'Unwrap it now!' she insisted on the 'phone.

In fact it was unexpectedly pleasing,

a pair of large, plain white mugs designed to look like Aran knitting. We had hot chocolate in them.

I made eight jars of white currant jelly so I'd have something to give people for Christmas, then had orzo (possibly my favourite pasta shape, what's yours?) with pesto and bacon for lunch, while Tom had an apple sandwich, which he prefers, then the wood came, which I'd ordered before I left.

For nearly twenty years we have had free fire wood from the farmer who farms our field. We negotiated a cord when we arrived, and he has faithfully delivered it every year, sometimes we've bought an extra one. As the cost of firewood rose and the value of land rental stagnated, this became a very good deal for us; the paterfamilias retired but still continued to honour the arrangement, but this year I felt he was avoiding the subject and us. I finally spoke to his wife on the phone, who prevaricated then said that in fact Pierre was no longer occupying himself with the wood, we'd need to talk to their son... We knew we'd as well talk to ourselves, cut our losses (which weren't losses anyway) and went and ordered supermarket wood. It is beautiful stuff,

clean and dry and fragrant, rounded at the corners from seasoning and turning. It came wrapped on pallets and took about an hour for both of us to unload and stack. I only wish it were cold enough to justify a fire, but it really isn't.

So now we are luxuriating in a comfortable level of fatigue, looking forward to a decadent convenience food supper of Fray Bentos steak puddings, tinned marrowfat peas and mash from the freezer, plenty of red wine, and a DVD of The Mill on the Floss. Bloody delightful.

Thanks for cards, e-mails and other treats. My cup runneth over, as always.

*where I also had a run-in with a nervy American girl who had used her backpack to reserve a table for four for herself alone while she went to queue. Seats were at a premium, the correct protocol was to queue, get food and then look for seats, as we had done. I moved her backpack and we all sat down together, and when she appeared claiming her 'reserved' seat I said, politely I thought, that I didn't think one could do that, we were four and needed seats and a bag on a seat was not a person. She went off, found a single seat then came back near to tears saying how rude I was, and I heard her bending the ears of the people she'd sat by about how ill-treated she'd been. Poor snowflake. I am such a meanie.

We went to England...

... flying over London,

to Essex, to Stansted Mountfitchet, which has a castle, but we didn't go into it, indeed we never have, because although it is a real Norman castle, or the remains of one, it has been developed into something resembling a large adventure playground:

There are tame deer there (you can just see them in the right of the picture) but they have warts, my sister says, and one of the peahens has escaped and wreaks havoc in my niece's garden, where it also laid a rather disgusting looking egg. All of which does not constitute good taste. My sister's house, however does, especially her piles of handmade patchwork quilts,

which are quite breathtaking when thrown out on display in a manner like that of Persian carpets, (I took many photos of them and hope to post them here, though it will be hard to do them full justice).

We ate rather a lot of cake, more or less every day. Oops.

 We visited Waltham Abbey,

and Norwich, which we now call Nowwitch, rather than Norritch,

and met some local residents:

We watched the world swing by from my sister's living room:

and we hung out with Ziggy the cat (you are best covering yourself with a large dust sheet and to wear light-coloured clothing when you do this, since he drops his own weight in clingy white fur every day, which Tom in his better-disposed moments says is stardust)

and friends - that's my niece, who's also called Tom, on the other side of Zig; she is all loveliness,

and we met up with Natalie (the first time for me), who is all loveliness too, and whose home is surely one of the richest, most colourful, stimulating and beautiful environments I've ever been in:

And then we flew home.

~

I was rather erratic in my photo taking, with hundreds of some subjects and none of others, though Tom took more, some of which I might pinch. However, in the manner of springtime holidays, we returned to a garden resembling the Lost Kingdom, but also with the refreshed will and motivation to get to work on it, and to weather which has, in a week, resolved to make the transition from bleak chill to smiling sunshine. I am also carrying an excess of weight from winter lassitude and all the cake which must needs be addressed and removed, and no small number of this-and-that projects to start and to finish, so heightened activity outside and elsewhere is called for. I'll be back on the blog scene as and when.

How Tom got to the pie shop and back

Not only did Tom avail himself of the aforementioned pie-and-mash, but in the scant three days he was there he also scoffed meals of fish and chips and chicken tikka masala.  Surprisingly, he still came home a good kilo lighter than he left.  This must in part have been due to the amount of walking he did, and descending the 100 odd steps into the Greenwich foot tunnel under the Thames.

He also went on the Docklands Light Railway, which I never have done, and pointed the camera at things around him.

I've cropped some of these, obviously, but haven't done much other editing, as I rather like the haphazard, sometimes blurry quality of them and the filmy overlay of reflections on glass inside and water out, and the rather hazy, desaturated colours of a London day.

Pie-and-mash regained, and Tom joins the pepperazzi.

Well, as it turned out, Tom's pie-and-mash dreams were not to be realised in Waltham Abbey after all.  Instead my sister took him, via the Docklands Light Railway, to Greenwich, where another noted pie eatery is to be found.  He came back with a number of photos, which I have unashamedly stolen from him to post here.

This was Goddards at Greenwich. 

From my recent researches into pie-and-mash shops in the English capital, it is apparent that, though these establishments have clearly undergone a renaissance, they have always been there in some numbers, and further, they are often rather fine and imposing places.  So why, in all the time I spent in London in my life, did I never notice them?  Not for the first time, I have concluded that I must have spent much of my life walking round with my eyes closed, at least to anything I didn't consider important. And in my youth, as with many people, what was important mostly consisted of myself, and by occasional and tenuous extension, the people around me, insofar as they related to me and what they might be thinking of me.  So I suppose I just wasn't looking out for pie-and-mash shops.

To return to Tom and my sister's excursion.  Tom chose chicken and mushroom, with the mystical and long-sought-after liquor.  My sister, who was somewhat bewildered, opted for traditional minced beef; she dithered when asked if she wanted liquor or gravy, so Tom took charge and ordered her liquor, stating that he had come all the way from France to taste again of pie liquor, and she could do likewise.

A little while ago on the radio I heard that in many restaurants eager foodies are annoying the staff and other customers by obsessive, in-your-face photographing of their food, not just quick souvenir snaps but messing about with lighting, climbing on their chairs to get a better angle, etc.  From dipping my toe into the increasing plethora of food blogs, some of them very posy and self-important, with people travelling vast distances to visit and write up various highly regarded eating places, and illustrating their reviews with some very professional looking photos, this doesn't surprise me. The radio commentators' view on it generally seemed to be that chefs and restaurants, and their users, having blown up the whole matter of eating out into such a grandiose, theatrical and exorbitant affair, had no one but themselves to blame, with which I'm inclined to agree.

Sad to say, though, it is to be seen that my nearest and dearest have succumbed and joined this group of self-appointed restaurant food photographers, whom the Urban Dictionary has wittily dubbed the pepperazzi. However, since it enables me to vicariously enjoy at least a little of the experience, I'm not complaining.

Sister was rather disappointed with the minced beef, but the chicken and mushroom, Tom said, really was excellent, with an enormous piece of white chicken meat at the centre of it, surrounded by the mushroom garnish, rather than the scrips and scraps of chicken in bland sauce that such preparations usually comprise.

The liquor, he said, from the first mouthful, was everything he remembered it to be.

The final verdict: an eloquently empty plate.

I was also happy to see these pictures of the interior, which I think has no little style and elegance.  The seats look like church pews.  Pie shops generally seem to favour dark green and cream décor, it's traditional and old-fashioned, and I suppose it also goes with the pie liquor. There are some other nice photos here at the shop's website.

I hope no one concerned would mind appearing in these pictures, I don't usually do this but feel the people and their attitudes do express something of the atmosphere of the place, of quietly convivial satisfaction, security and tranquillity.

Tom, who always professes not to be a great people-person, was quite smitten watching these two old boys tucking into their food.

So, all in all, the adventure was gratifyingly successful.  I was sorry not to have been there, but I expect I'll have another opportunity; by the look of it, the pie shops will be around for a while yet. 

 Post-pie satisfaction.

~

(I'll also post some of his other photos from the trip, from the railway, next time, as they are rather good, and certainly more interesting than anything that a grey and rain-sodden pre-spring round here has to offer.) 

In which Tom goes in search of Proustian pie and mash moments

Tom has gone to Essex for his annual MOT of ears and eyes, which means entrusting him to the good offices of my sister.  He's there for really not much more than a couple of days, but will have one whole day free, for which he has been granted an outing of his choice, within the means of transport available, ie accessible by train, bus or within my sister's comfortable driving range.  He was drawn to Maldon, but it really was rather a long way - Essex is surprisingly vast - and the arterial roads through and around Chelmsford turned out to be too daunting a prospect.  The attractions of Maldon were initially sailing barges and general Thames Estuary olden-times wateriness, but in fact had become focussed on the existence of a pie-and-mash shop in the town.

One of Tom's great yearnings, a kind of gastronomic Holy Grail for him, has been to recreate the experience of pie-and-mash as he remembers it from his London East-end childhood.  Not so much the pie or even the mash, in fact, but the weird green green sauce that went with it, known as liquor.  

You would think this would be fairly easy, making a thin kind of velouté (I am aware that using a fancy French culinary term here might be amusingly inappropriate, but we are speaking of processes) seasoned with parsley, white pepper and vinegar, but it isn't.  I have been led to wonder if perhaps at some point some broth from the stewing or jellification of eels which were the other offerings of the pie-and-mash establishments might have found its way into this concoction, providing a similar mysterious and transformational element of marine-based umami to that provided by fish sauce in Thai cooking. liquamen in Roman dishes, anchovies in ... whatever I feel like sneaking them into.  Or perhaps the secret ingredient is nostalgia, which might prove more elusive.  Quite why Tom actually wants to be transported back to his childhood, which is generally concluded to have been fairly unremittingly rubbish, is hard to say, but these things are not susceptible to explanation.

Anyway, having set his heart on said pie-and-mash, we set about researching where it might be procured nearer to my sister's home, and it turns out to have become a kind of shabby chic, retro-trendy thing, and the shops which offer it have undergone quite a renaissance, cropping up all over the place and acquiring a new and younger clientèle   This is partly because of course, as with Athens in the Acts, all the Londoners and the strangers which were there spend their time in nothing else but to either to tell, hear - or eat - of some new thing, which sometimes will inevitably be some old thing come round again.  And partly, it seems, it's because David Beckham eats pie-and-mash.  Whenever he's home from foreign parts, he likes nothing more than to head for none other than Tony's Pie and Mash Shop in Waltham Abbey, which, it turns out, is only a few stops down the train line from where my sister lives.

When we did the little-yellow-man street view thing on Google maps, this is what we saw:

people rushing in droves through the door to get to the pies (don't quite know why there are two As in the word 'mash' on the signboard, something to do with how the camera works).  I was concerned; what if they couldn't get a table?  Where we come from now you book to eat in popular places.  I telephoned, and think I probably got Tony himself.  My husband is coming all the way from France with a longing for pie-and-mash and a very short time to satisfy it, should we reserve a table to make sure? Nope, I was assured in a brisk estuary accent, he can just come in and sit right down...

Anyway, I just hope it all works out all right, or at least Tom isn't too disappointed or my sister too traumatised by the experience.  I just read a write up of the eatery on Chilli Marmalade, a very bright and unpretentious London-based food blog, which read

What’s liquor? I hear you ask… Well. Words fail me. Think about what would happen if you dumped a whole lot of dried parsley and white pepper into a bucket of wallpaper glue, added vinegar, and stirred.

Oh dear.  She did add though, that in spite of this she still finished most of it, and that it was 'weirdly moreish'.

I wonder if it's better sometimes to leave lost time unsearched for...

Snowscape with Pie-and-Mash shop, by Chris Poole from photos on Google maps.  Looks like the chap in the foreground has overindulged somewhat.

(There's more information at the Pie and Mash Club website, including an extensive directory with links to write-ups of visits to the shops.  The Club exists not so much to provide gourmet evaluations as to see which of its members can eat the most, and the accounts and descriptions are often very funny indeed.  I never knew this thriving sub-culture even existed.)

More Windows

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.)