Last day of November

Probably a title I've used before, since most years I have made this strangely binding commitment, to myself and the outside online world,m whatever my state of relations with the blogging medium, to do this every day, and, as with most years, I don't mind that I've done so. Having an rendezvous here every evening has indeed been quite helpful this year, when I've found myself somewhat beset with perturbations and not altogether pleasant distractions. It's been good to be obliged to post something, without fretting too much as to whether it's likely to be worthwhile, or whether I've got anything to show or tell, and even when I've been quite sure I haven't, I've found I have after all, worthwhile or not. If that makes sense.

Thanks to all of you who've looked in and left comments. I think I feel a little more reconnected with blogs and blogging again, and hope I'll be more often moved to post more often and more unselfconsciously again. I look forward now to being able to get around to visiting all of you and yours, apologies for neglecting to do so, and to the recent newer visitors I've not paid return calls to yet. I thought I might try to make the final post one of answering the comments I didn't get around to replying to at the time, like Catalyst's question as to why I left the scanner lid open when I scanned the liquidambar leaves (I hoped it might give a darker ground and a more 3D effect), but I've rather run out of time to comb through, and you've probably forgotten what you might have said by now anyway and not to worry.

Now needing to bend myself to sorting through the dazzling array of submissions for the Alphabet Soup exhibition at Clive's, ( I've linked to it plenty, if you don't know what I'm talking about by now...) with the excellent back-up that I have this will surely be only a pleasure - I'll keep posted with progress for that here as well.

So a quick pic of some cockles put to soak.  Sho Shellfish.

  

29 things for the 29th

 Dried liquidambar

 Red green and blue baking dishes

 Our 10% off day at the DIY store

Oily brown wood-pulp firelighters in an old tea caddy with Notre Dame on it

The odd word 'caddy'

Prototype

'Terracotta warriors with an artistic twist'

Deciding not to order bathroom tiles even though it's our 10% off day

Glad to have finished A Place of Greater Safety

I like the flat lid shells of scallops better than the dish-shaped bottom shells

Mind my car

Molly munching pea pods

Sun through the red plastic funnel like a red balloon

Big bags for garden clearing

Saladings

Rubi the labrador is thirteen, and rather overweight.  He lay down too much and got bedsores, but now he's much better

Vermeer's Lady at a Virginal; she looks a bit drippy

Black leggings under purple yoga pants.  Bug-rug-snug

Where did the hills stop and the clouds begin?

Garlic mushrooms good, baked beans better *

Little boat: best (non-edible) thing ever in an ice cream

Yellow glints of sallow leaves

Two packs of chestnut wood floorboards

Pepitas

Thinking about birthday lunch

Thinking about Christmas dinner

Soft foxtail larch tops against the hill

Just one more thing...

Bwha- ha-ha-ha!

* with baked potatoes

Tipping points and other matter(s).

Hard to say what the feeling about the tipping point is.  Not exactly the imminence of death, as I suppose Anne was talking about in her comment, though doubltless related.  More perhaps the sense that the capacity to grow and benefit from vicissitudes and reverses seems to wane, that overall the balance seems to be towards lessening, that experiences cease to augment one's stock and substance, and tend to diminish them.  But such metaphors are probably flawed; what stock, what substance? I suppose I assumed that the gaps left by losses would always be filled by something else, now I'm not sure.  But the tendency to look on the bleak side is at least in part a function of one's nature as much as one's age and stage, which doesn't mean you shouldn't try to curb it.

Anyway.

~

We really must eat more baked potatoes.

~

The bank manager rang.  I am easily confused on the phone about who people are.  He reminded me he was Sophie's and Stephanie's dad and then I placed him, but instantly assumed there was a problem.  Well, he did say he was concerned about our account.  I ran upstairs, 'phone in hand, to consult Tom:

'He says we've only got X euros in there!'

'Well, that's more than usual...'

After a bit, and after I'd spluttered apologetically about having to move some money over from the UK, paying the gardener and getting another car, but how we'd managed to scrape up the funds for that in liquide by other means, he went on to say that if we didn't need it all there he recommended we move some of it over to the savings account. He was not reproving us for inadequate funds but the opposite. It was our instant reaction, though, to an authority figure to assume we must be in trouble, even if he is Sophie and Stephanie's dad.  

Though why bother, we wondered, it's not as though we'd get anything on it anyway, interest on savings being a nice idea but not to be dreamed of again in our lifetime.  We speculated that perhaps in response to the increased Greek bail-out, all the bank managers of France had been issued with instructions to move as much money to more usable places.  Yes, that must be it, we are doing our bit to help with the Eurozone-in-crisis.

I promised him we'd move some over, and sent kisses to Sophie and Stephanie.

~

'Phone in hand.  Yes, we have a cordless 'phone at last,  I finally faced the fact that my fear and loathing of the telephone, which has made me stubbornly refuse to have any more to do with it than I had to and so not to modernise in any way, was cutting my nose off to spite my face.  It was even worse to be pinned in the corner by it and not even able to move around and do anything else. Still no answering machine, though, that would be going to far in conceding to the Watson-come-here-please-I-want-you tyranny.

~

Touching wood, crossing fingers, and performing all manner of other superstitious contortions one can think of, the plumbing leak seems to be fixed on the second attempt.  

~

Tom likes the new car.  It's nippy and fun, and he likes the change.  I still don't really want much to do with it.  Tom refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of a tipping point.

~

Looking through old pics to find one of interest, I came across this one of the emptying of the septic tank, which, it turns out, took place about eighteen months ago (so we don't need to think about having that done again just yet, photos and blogging are so useful for keeping informal records).

Fear not, nothing too detailed is revealed of this necessary but always to my rather prissy English bourgeois sensibilities, slightly embarrassing operation.  At least not to you.  However, as may be seen, Victor and his sister Hélène couldn't get close enough.  They are both over ninety, and we don't see all that much of them these days, but no sooner had the septic tank emptying truck arrived than they both got wind of it, so to speak, and turned up to chew the fat while peering down the hole at our bodily waste products and their evacuation.  They greeted us only perfunctorily, it seems it was our poo they were primarily interested in. Bless them.

The Manitou and little Mol

RRobinson expressed a familiarity with the brand of French heavy building plant 'Manitou'.  Our Jean-Paul was very proud of his Manitou, which he brought along when he re-aligned our lintels and smartened up our chimney.  He was very keen we should pose in the shovel of it at some height from the ground, so here am I,

and here's Tom - blimey, he still wears that shirt: 

Those were taken probably fourteen years ago, long pre-digital, scans of old film snaps I've looked out.  The changes in the landscape, how trees and garden have grown up since, is noticeable to me in the first picture.  Looking into the old photo album is quite unsettling, possibly salutary.  In many ways it feels as though life didn't really begin until we came here to live, and since then that time has stood still; I can't quite believe it's been well over fifteen years, that I was still in my mid-thirties, Tom not yet into his sixties when we came.  Yet looking over those old pictures, it's apparent that we have covered quite a bit of ground, and indeed aged.  I'd pick out more to scan and show here, but it makes me feel rather sad and shaky to look too much at them.  I find myself wondering if we haven't reached the tipping point.  I'm afraid I do think there might be a tipping point.

Those days were also pre-Molly, and later pages show her puppy years, which also makes me feel a bit  wobbly inside.  But it's been good, and worth everything. I'd be a coward to say otherwise.

Molly, in her first year.

Pumpkins and kippers for soup, and a bombastic bloater.

Got a couple of collages done for Alphabet Soup today.  I think I'm probably on course to get perhaps a half-dozen completed, with ideas for the rest which might or might not come to fruition once the deadline heat is off.

So here is P for pumpkin:

That thing in the middle of the right-hand pumpkin flower is a messed-up scribble, which I meant to do something to correct but forgot to.  But the good thing about this technique is you can stick stuff on top!  So I think I'll make it a bumble bee.

The next one proved to be somewhat topical:

Kippers.  I have mixed feelings about these smoked members of the herring tribe, indeed about most smoked fish really. We used to get them in England that were boil-in-the-bag, from a man with a van who came round.  His stuff was so expensive the kippers were all we could really bring ourselves to buy, and I know that b-i-t-b is shameful and Not Proper Food but these were just so good and so easy and didn't stink the place out.   Now I often swear I will not buy kippers here again, but then Tom looks at them with such longing I give in, knowing the ordeal I have in store in the preparation of them, often for a dry, salty, disappointing result.  Those vacuum packed Breton smoked herrings in oil are not much better, but at least you don't have to wrestle with fins and bones and stuff, and they don't smell quite so bad.

So when we were at a low ebb in the supermarket the other day and my dear one's eyes fell upon a bloater, or un bouffi, as it is known hereabouts in pleasingly transparent translation (and as an adjective it seems that also means 'bombastic' according to the dictionary), instead of saying 'put it down it's disgusting' as I might have had I been feeling stronger, I allowed him to put it in the trolley.

I have never actually handled a bloater before; it took me a couple of days, until today, to square up to the thing and only then did I realise it was whole, all it's innards still contained within its plump form - hence its puffiness and its name, I suppose.  Fortunately it was in a sealed pack and well within it's eat-by date, as the well-documented 'gaminess' and it's bloating tendencies might have been really unmanageable.  I was by this time feeling slightly stronger and less self-sacrificing, and picking over it's smoky, slimy guts, jaundiced eyes, intact gills and hairy bones I felt little compunction in saying that 'I am only putting myself through this because I love you and because I'm still feeling mortified about smashing up the car, so yes I am largely doing it out of guilt.' He ventured to say he might not in fact enjoy it much under those terms but I said he'd bloody better do so.

But then something happened when I looked at the generous and firm portion of roe that emerged from it, which one source described as the cook's treat, I couldn't help myself thinking, and saying aloud: 'That looks good!'.  The bronze, gold and silver skin with its delicate criss-cross patterning was also rather exquisite, and by the time I'd cleaned up the fillets and put them, with the roe, under the grill, and having eaten a good portion of Jean-Paul's crisp and cleansing scarole salad, I was coming round to the idea that I might have some after all.

It really was very good indeed, much better than any kippers we've had here, and it was very inexpensive.  The roe was saltier than the flesh, but spread on a piece of bread was very interesting too.  So I will buy them again, now I know what I'm letting myself in for, or else find a way to persuade Tom that dissecting and preparing a bloater for consumption is a project that he really needs to engage with for his moral, intellectual and spiritual betterment.

(Kedgeree is also a good smoked fish option, and also begins with a 'K'. Kippers don't in fact make one's breath smell, so kissing is not completely out of the question.)

Low light and camera shake

Left it late to get out on a glorious ormolu autumn day.  Thought I'd take the camera anyway and see what inadvertent effects might be achieved.  Not much editing involved beyond wilful ineptitude and a bit of cropping.  

 

Three good things for today

We got invited to visit Jean-Paul, our stonemason, and his girlfriend Huguette.  The live in what was once a fairly ordinary concrete house on the edge of a small town near here, but which JP has entirely covered with salvaged stone, perfectly shaped and pointed.  They ply us with wine and coffee and rather too much sweet stuff, but the best bit it JP's loft, which covers the whole house and is, very tidily, full of his stuff, including a set of toy models: a little house, a yellow crane, a very fine die-cast Manitou (like a JCB), and a fork-lift.  On the day of his sixtieth birthday and so of his retirement, when he would have given up the full-sized versions of these things, he said, he came downstairs to find these laid out on the kitchen table for him.  There was also a figure of a man in working clothes with a shovel, which, I pointed out, was somewhat out-of-scale and too large for the toy vehicles and plant.  Well it's only an imitation, he said.

~

Laying the fire before we went out, so it only needed a fire-lighter and a match when we came home.  The chimney needs sweeping, but an advantage of this windy weather is it's drawing better than usual. (Which doesn't make up for the hammering the south-west of England is taking, I know.)

~

Part of young Eve's bird alphabet, which arrived today by e-mail for the Soup.  The girl is seriously gifted.

More spicy goings-on in the kitchen

Reached out for the black peppercorns, the lid came off the jar!

It reminded me of once when I saw a woman drop a punnet of blueberries in the supermarket.  They fell through the mesh of her trolley and dispersed across the smooth floor like an explosion of lapis marbles, a fruity super-nova.  She looked around as if she wished she could flee, but there was nowhere to run, the berries were everywhere, and if she had wheeled the trolley over them, the carnage would have been terrible.

On dropping the peppercorns, I exclaimed, gasped, nay squealed. The area of impact seemed far greater than the consequent inch or so of vacant space in the jar would seem to indicate, in the same way that it seemed like far more than a mere punnet of blueberries that spread across the supermarket floor.  Tom came running to the rescue.  Knowing it wasn't as bad as he must have expected from the noise I made, I let him find out for himself and experience the relief that there were no actual breakages, no lacerating shards (it was a plastic jar), no chemicals hazardous to health, involved.

Yet the clear-up was no simple matter, each time one tried to gather any up, further dispersal seemed to result.

Finally he disappeared upstairsand came down with the right tool for the job, a hogs-hair fan-brush, which accomplished the task admirably.

Phew!

( The upside-down pink plastic beaker in the first photo is the Spider Cup.  It usually has a postcard beside it, I use those which people send me from various global locations when they start looking a bit tired on the shelf or pinboard, considering it a useful way for old postcards to end their lives. Arachnid appears, oop-la, pink beaker over the top, postcard underneath, out of the door with her...)

And that piece of inconsequentiality really is my post for today! 

Sniffing the spice rack

The bay leaves reminded me to do this.  I can recommend it, as pure immediate pleasure but also as a mnemonic way down at the limbic level.  Some draw surprise memories, yet some draw blanks, are simply what they are, among these were some of my favourites, coriander, cumin and cardomon.  With others it's hard to know whether the smell is genuinely provoking the response or if a more complex and intellectual series of associations is taking place.  Not that it matters too much, it's just fun.

Open each jar, place nose over, inhale deeply, catch the memory. If you've forgotten what was in the jar already, so much the better. This is more or less the order mine come in.

• Garam masala: R's house, winter afternoons, c. 1984, her cauliflower curry and sweet rice. Having no idea how to teach English.
• Ground ginger: one year, my mum made some home-made ginger beer.  She used ground ginger and yeast. It fermented wildly - it wasn't meant to - and was fairly horrid.  Many of the bottles exploded violently at the top of the cellar stairs, we kept finding bits of the broken glass for ages after.
• Juniper berries:  (You have to crush one) Gin, of course. It's hard to separate it from the associated flavour of tonic.  I had my first sip from my sister-in-law's tumbler on the banks of Llangorse Lake in Wales, when I was maybe eleven or twelve and my brother was sailing there.  It was sunny and the glass was pretty. I've never been a great gin enthusiast, and went off it later; I could probably drink it again now, but don't, preferring to macerate sloes in it .  Now it reminds me of Doug, who died last year, and his dry Martinis.
• Paprika - oddly reminds me of big pans of chilli at the veggie restaurant in Cardiff. This is good stuff, warm and fruity, which B the German doctor brings back for me when she visits her sister in Hungary.
• Turmeric - again, the veggie restaurant, sesame potatoes, sautéed in the big iron woks, served with yoghurt and cucumber.
• Almond essence - marzipan, which in turn reminds me of Tom, who loves it. The smell creates the sensation of the ground almonds in the mouth, in the same way that a convincing peach aroma provokes the feel of peach-fuzz on the lips.
• Caraway - seed cake, my dad's funeral.
• Cinnamon - cinnamon toast, visiting my GI bride auntie in Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen.  Also a strange red translucent toothpaste also from my teen years, I forget its name, when there was a notion that toothpaste could taste of anything but mint.
• Fennel - Greece.  Ouzo, perhaps, but also the smell of the warm air when you got off the plane.
• Five spice - simply of stir fries.
• Nutmeg - old larders, twilighty and cool, somewhat fusty.
• Oregano - pizzas, of course.  Perhaps the the take-away in Belsize Park where Fire Bird sometimes worked when we were students. Or is that just an association with the idea of pizzas? Perhaps the oregano just reminds me of pizza-flavoured things...
• Sumac - a relatively recent acquisition, and elusive in cooking; unexpectedly, the smell makes me think of some kind of powdered drink mix from childhood.
• Tarragon - Bearnaise sauce, steak restaurants.
• Vanilla pods - every ice cream ever. 
• White pepper - as a child, white pepper was the only kind I knew, on the table with school dinner.  I didn't like it, and though I have come to appreciate it as different from black but of quite serviceable flavour, it still smells a bit yuk.
• Black pepper (in a large pot in the corner) - this is such a commonplace that I didn't really expect it to have any particular associations, yet it was one of the most vivid surprises, as it took me back to the summer of the cabbages. When I was sixteen, my parents moved to a house in Brighton with a pretty and productive garden around it.  The old boy who had lived there before had planted a number of magnificent, heraldic cabbages.  They were full of juicy green cabbage white caterpillars, but were so substantial that there seemed to be plenty left for us, but you had to pick them over really carefully. This was my job and I took pride in it.  Lightly boiled, with butter and a good twist of black pepper, it was the first time I realised quite how good both cabbage and black pepper could be.  Once we were out and asked my dad to prepare the cabbage, he simply quartered, rinsed and boiled it.  I lifted the lid of the pan and saw a shoal of fat caterpillars bobbing and bubbling on the surface of the water.

Try it yourselves, see what comes up.  It's a whole world of travel without leaving your kitchen.

A bunch of bayleaves

The hedge cutter man is savaging the garden.  It's really no bad thing, everything will look better for it in the end, but it's kind of brutal and rather stressful, and we feel he goes a bit far sometimes. I'm sure he thinks we're daft English and too soft on our shrubs.

Tom brought a branch of bayleaves up which he felt needed sparing from the bonfire, did I want it for the kitchen?  I like the flavour of bay, one of the first things I learned to cook after I'd left home was a very simple potato soup, from Diet for a Small Planet I think, and the bayleaf was the making of it.  The smell of the leaves reminds me of a family holiday we took at an old house somewhere in mid-Wales called Gwynfryn, it was just before my siblings embarked on their first wave of emigration, so I was six.  There were gardens with lawns and tall bay hedges, and a sheepdog called Fly.  My sister Alison took the varnish off one of the dressing tables with nail-polish remover, my other sister was pregnant and cried when our sister-in-law got cross with her little boy, our nephew.  He and I shared a bath and some rude words.  We were happy and sad.  For the rest of her life I could crush a bay leaf in my hand and hold it out to my mum and one of us would say 'Gwynfryn'. Some of these memories may be slightly muddled but all of them are real.

The hedge man said he had a brother living in the country near us somewhere.  I questioned that he didn't know quite where.  He said he had fallen out with his family fifteen years or so ago.  I made the conventional noises about these things happen, sometimes it's easier to get on with some family members than others...

It was about his children, he said.  He and his wife adopted two Vietnamese children as babies, a girl and a boy.  I met his daughter, who is now seventeen, briefly once when she was working with him next door, perhaps a year ago.  She's beautiful, and so bright and open and grown-up, and clearly had such a good co-operative relationship with him, that I thought briefly that she was older than that and might be his younger wife, before I understood she was his daughter.  He speaks of her with great admiration, for her drive and hard-work and ambition, and it amuses him that the famous King Charles spaniel sleeps on her bed. His son he speaks of with a more rueful but equally genuine love and affection.

But when they told his parents about the adoption plans, which presumably came about because they couldn't have children of their own, and showed them a photo of their future baby daughter, the naked, cruel racism of both of their reactions was shocking, and much of  it unrepeatable.  His father said he would be ashamed to be seen holding the hand of such a child.  His brothers were less offensive but gave them no support.  A couple of years ago he did attend the christening of one of his brother's children, with his now-teenage daughter, the first time anyone in the family had seen her.  His brother commented, quite seriously, on how well she spoke French.

When his father died a few years ago, other family members exhorted him to build bridges, make an effort, resume relations with his mother and the rest of the family. No, he said, it's too late, finished; they made no efforts for him, and why risk being hurt again and hurting his children too?

When they go on holiday, they leave the King Charles spaniel with his wife's mother. Do they get on all right, I ask, the dog and the mother-in-law?  Oh yes, he said, she's a good mother-in-law.

He left earlier today to take his son to ping-pong and his daughter to her driving lesson.  He puts in a fairly short day but works non-stop, his armoury of machinery is formidable and nothing is too hard for him, he's a hard man.  He's working elsewhere tomorrow, so we can at least have a bit of a lie-in and a day without the whirr of the hedge-trimmer.