Staycation

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

~ 

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.

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

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

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

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...

~
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

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?

'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

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.

~