Funny fungi

I've done this a lot before, photos of fungi, it's that time of year. I've even got a tag for them. That's rather the problem with this kind of blogging, and of life in the countryside, I suppose. The seasons have a habit of coming round again and again with much the same features. Or perhaps it's not a problem. 

Anyway, fungi continue to be weird and wonderful, these were all found in the garden, a more appealing thing to be doing there than sweeping up leaves.

The above growths appear in the holes left in eucalyptus trunks, when branches split and break, as they often do. I wonder why a non-native species should so readily host passing fungi, but I don't really know anything about it.

The frilly orangey ones below, at different stages of their fruition (for mushrooms and toadstools are all fruiting bodies) are all over the ground among the leaf litter:

I've only tended to edit them a bit by deepening the shadows to accentuate the form, but with the two below, as I'd got a bit carried away with the digital zoom on the camera and they looked rather odd and fuzzy, I put a 'lomo' filter on them in Picasa, for fun: 

Change, death and decay, that's fungi for you.

Weirdest and most alien and macabre of all are these earth balls, puffballs' dark doppelgangers:

It's their planet really, theirs and the insects'. We're just passing through.

Elfin Friday - through a bone, hopefully

She does love a bone. This one brought back from the supermarket, one of two in a pack, a couple of weeks ago at least. The meat attaching and the marrow within were made to disappear within an hour at most, but the bone really has gone on and on, we still often hear gnawing sounds coming from her corner, though there's nothing left on it at all. The other one is in the freezer still, for a rainy day.

You can take it off her though, no argument. Such a good dog.

Throwback Thursday - Loot and Pip

That's my brother and I,

just to show I wasn't always scowling. This is a studio photograph taken by my Uncle Jack, the family photographer, and I would guess that the 69 in the serial number he has given it refers to 1969, when I would have been in my eighth year, and Pip, my brother Philip, now usually just Phil, would have been about ten. He wasn't called Pip much after a very young age, except by my dad, it embarrassed him. Once Mrs Grange, a large, jolly, generous and cultivated friend of our family, saw Phil on Berkhamsted High Street with a couple of his mates when he was about seventeen and called out 'Hello Pippy!', much to his shame and chagrin, of course. Mrs Grange had wanted to be my godmother when I was born, but my mother in a fit of integrity for which I never quite forgave her, said no, I was not going to be christened, she didn't believe in it any more and wasn't going to go through the motions. Mrs Grange delighted me when I was sixteen by seating me on her chaise longue and offering me a cigarette in front of my parents. It would have been worth being hailed in the street as Looty to have been on the receiving end of Mrs Grange's indulgence and patronage, but it was not to be.

There are a whole series of these photos of us and our parents (one of which is in the post about my mum a couple of years ago), for which we were all obviously scrubbed and brushed and dressed in our best (that dress was finely patterned velveteen in rich blues, greens and purples, still my favourite colours, though I was disinclined towards pretty dresses by then), with a range of expressions from the serious to the hilarious. They are really very nice photos; I often think that Jack was a rather bad photographer of people because his heart wasn't in it, but these are mostly warm and attractive. I don't know what he was saying or doing to amuse us, typically Phil has given way to pure mirth first, but my smile is genuine, if a bit vague. In the next one I am open-mouthed with laughter too.

Mum once said to me when I was in a particularly lugubrious and miserable phase, probably a bit older than I am in this photo: 'You know you can be a depressing person. Philip can drive you mad sometimes but at least he's not depressing'. I know this sounds harsh, I probably was driving her to distraction and I'm really not fishing for sympathy about it! Nevertheless, despite this and the frowning photographs, my abiding memory of childhood, at least where my interactions with Philip were concerned, were largely of this pure merriment that you can see in his face here. Laughter was one of his principal driving forces, along with learning and cleverness; he ruled our television watching like a dictator, (I was scarcely allowed to know of the existence of ITV, only BBC passed muster) but more even than the geeky (the word didn't exist then), improving tenor of Blue Peter and Tomorrow's World, it was the funny stuff that had him yelling up the stairs or down the garden ' Loot! Tom and Jerry/Dad's Army/ Morecambe and Wise...' or whatever. He would get so excited watching something he found particularly uproarious that he would bounce up and down, higher and higher, in his seat, and my dad would say with exasperation 'Pip, can you not do that to the furniture!'

We went through the motions of scrapping, big brother, little sister; physical fights when we were small, in which in fact he was as inhibited as a well brought up puppy, I was rarely hurt and indeed rather relished it if I could claim to be, since as smaller, younger and female I would inevitably get sympathy from everyone else in the family and he would get told off. I never felt unsafe. My sister still laughs and does an imitation of a six-year-old Philip protesting 'Favouwitithm!' when she hauled us apart. (Her other favourite quote from him at this age was when she brought some particularly gifted older design students home from college and they found themselves interviewed by him with intense scrutiny. After they had left he remarked to her 'I didn't know you had such intelligent friends!'). I also remember a time when we were perhaps in our teens, on a caravan holiday, when we decided to have an insult joust; we sat face to face and came up with the most imaginative names we could for each other. I finally called him an amoeba, and he graciously conceded the match to me. And another holiday moment, when we were very little, a warm summer evening when we were out and about, and he said 'Loot, I wish you weren't my sister.' 'Why?' 'Because you're nice.'

Despite my dolorous and tragedy-queen moments, when I was in disgrace with fortune and my classmates' eyes, which led to my mother's comment about our respective characters, I think in many ways I found childhood and school easier than he did. His particular cleverness, his unmoderated excitement which caused him to bounce on the furniture when Jerry got Tom caught in the mousehole and which still distinguishes his speech and manner now, his curly hair, all made him different in a time when I think perhaps it was harder to be different than it is now. But he didn't whinge, he found things to make him laugh, he got cleverer, he went to Cambridge and he married Angela, a mathematician at least as clever as he is. They live, as far as I can tell, happily ever after.

We see each other only now and then, but I think we hold each other in real affection. When I'm around him, I try a bit too hard to be clever and funny.

Ten good things today

I fulfil my pledge to clear three barrow loads of hedge cuttings before lunch, and get rid of a handful of nasty brambles into the bargain, with only minimal scratching for my pains.

Last night's baroque concert turned out not to be really a concert at all, but an excruciating, facetious kind of 'educational' programme about the court of Louis XIV, with about ten minutes of talk to every two of music, though the musicians, clavichord, viola de gamba player and singer, were good. Dutch E, her friend S and I slip away early. It was disappointing not to have enjoyed good music, and I do so enjoy the viola de gamba, but so nice to be home having listened to our inclinations rather than timidity and need to be polite. The relief is still with me today.

I don't get to Quessquitricote because my car is in the garage, having expensively failed its controle technique (two-yearly roadworthiness test). Neither of these thing is good news, but with the aforesaid virtuous garden chores, I feel I am justified in spending time this afternoon knitting.

It rains more and more on our afternoon walk. Elfie is the same colour as the autumn leaves and bracken - or her russet-orange bits are anyway - and snuffs the wind and rain with gusto and runs off-leash for much of the way without buggering off once.

Started some mittens with the leftovers of the Icelandic wool (out of which I made this sweater). It's more purple and red than the picture shows. Adding Latvian braids to them. I love Latvian braids. I love Icelandic wool.

Smell of wet dog.

Glass of rosé.

Japanese rice crackers. With one in one hand and the SD card in the other, I narrowly avoid putting the latter in my mouth instead of the former.

The rain and wind is coming from the north, for a change. This makes it cold, and noisy on the bedroom skylight, but means it will not blow in under the doors and windows.

Pork chops and pink onions.

Letter from America

That was a radio programme I grew up with, a weekly fifteen minute broadcast by British born, naturalised American Alastair Cooke, on BBC Radio 4. It began in 1946 (it's roots were even earlier, in the 1930s) and the last one was broadcast in 2004, just a month before Cooke's death at the age of 95, and was the longest running speech radio programme in history. I remember sitting up as a kid on Friday nights, often not really understanding the subject matter, or even really listening for information anyway, but just wondering at and wallowing in Cooke's rich, mellifluous voice, and the crafting of his language, his beautiful, embedded sentences, a perfect balance of discursive and precise.

In the wake of the US election, this week in the Book of the Week slot in the mornings, Radio 4 has commissioned a series of new Letters from America from individual US based writers, today's was by Thomas Chatterton Williams.  He began with this quote from H.L.Mencken, which I imagine is getting quite a bit of airing at the moment:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

and which caught my attention, but the whole was far more than a petulant or despairing rant against the American electorate and their elected, it was impressive, eloquent, brave and honest, and as beautifully crafted and delivered as anything Cooke did. At fifteen minutes, well worth following the link. The others will doubtless but of high quality too ( can be found from the same R4 page); I've not listened to the Zoe Heller one which they kicked off with, but will do.

There is talk they may revive the regular Letter from America in this format, which would be good. All Cooke's original letters are archived and still available to listen to here.

Autumn groundscapes

The kind of thing I used to do a lot, it's still good to do it.

The winds and rains blowing in, the edges of the storms which are wreaking havoc across the Channel are finally stripping the trees of their foliage, but it's been a very fine autumn.

Garlic chicken

While the garlic chicken is cooking.

Here is the recipe for garlic chicken.

Take one oven ready chicken, large or small.

Make a kind of garlic butter paste, with a lot of crushed garlic, maybe a whole bulb,  not too much butter... OK, quite a bit of butter, and some olive oil, and a chicken stock cube. Some fresh herbs if you wish. Smush it all up with a fork; if it's hard to break down the cube, you can add a little hot water.

Keep some of the garlic cloves back and whole.

Chop up an onion, some shallots too if you like, or little onions you can keep whole. Fry the onion in some olive oil and/or bacon drippings. I always use up bacon drippings, we have bacon sandwiches at lunchtime on Sundays. Sue me or send the food police round, I don't care. You can start with some lardons (chopped streaky bacon) if you like. Oh yes, you have to do this in a big stove-top to oven iron pan, Dutch oven, le Creuset casserole thing, call it what you will. If you don't have one you'll have to adapt, but then it's no longer a one pot meal. You could even make it in a crockpot I suppose.

This recipe is very flexible, the main thing is the crushed garlic butter paste, which you then smear inside the cavity of the chicken, under its skin, anywhere really though perhaps not into you hangnails or any mucus membranes if you can help it. I always get it in my hangnails anyway, it's a winter recipe so the chances are I've got hangnails, I soon find out. And that you keep the chicken whole so the stuff oozes out through the flesh and skin.

When you've sautéd or if possible caramelised the onions quite a bit, put the thoroughly garlicated chicken into the pan and brown all sides.

While these things are happening, peel and chop some carrots and potatoes. Add these, and the whole peeled garlic cloves you've kept back, to the pan round the edges of the chicken which has now finished up breast up. Stir them around a bit, if some get inside the chicken - I have usually removed the string so the bird is very décontracté - so much the better.

When everything's nicely coated top it up with liquid, enough to cover the veg and most of the chicken. What liquid is up to you; the original recipe, for there was one, from a French country cookbook I borrowed from the library back in England, was a very basic affair and just called for water (and no stock cube either), but I use whatever comes to hand, chicken stock from the freezer, wine or cider (best to reduce these a bit), this time I poured in the remainder of some very louche looking home-made pommeau Paul at Kerbiriou sent us home with a couple of visits ago. Smells good anyway.*

Put the lid on the pan and let it really get bubbling hot through.

Transfer it to the oven, with the lid on, or if your lid isn't oven proof you could put foil over it. Leave it to cook, in which time you can wash up all the stuff, watch some telly, do a blog post, whatever. You can have the oven quite hot. It's a very forgiving dish and the longer you cook it the better, though if the chicken's falling apart too much it's a bit tricky to get it out to cut it up, or pull it apart rather.

Take the lid off for the last 15 minutes or so to brown it off a bit.

If you only have a stove top, this can be done entirely on that, though it really is better for an hour or so in the oven.

We eat it from great big soup bowls, quite deep ones; I ladle out the broth first, then the veg, and put the pieces of chicken on top. Tom likes breast and I like leg and so between the two of us we do the Jack Spratt thing.

You can use all kind of other veg in it too, root veg of any kind, and celery is very good. Potatoes are essential because they soak up all the flavours and become very voluptuous. I have done summer versions with tomatoes and peppers and stuff, but really that's a different dish, and I'd say avoid the temptation to put tomato in it; there is altogether too much tomato used in much everyday cookery, or there was. These days I don't buy a tin of tomatoes from one year's end to the next. As I say, it's a winter dish, and needs winter things in it.

If you don't like garlic... well, God bless you, as the song goes.

The oven has just pinged, and Tom is asking how much longer?

* and it was very good, I'm just finishing this after dinner.

A can of worms, and something fluffy to cover it up again

With daily blogging, I've taken occasionally to having a look at my stats information, something I've not done for a very long time. I don't place any importance on or faith in them at all, of course. I'm sometimes a bit curious about referring sites and URLs though; many of them seems to be weird kind of feed, aggregation sites whatever, things I've never understood. A really odd one though, that in the last week, I've had thirty-three referrals from the Spectator, specifically, it seems, their blogs page. This led me to follow the link back to try to find out how this might have happened, how on earth Box Elder could have been linked to from anyone involved with the publication in any way shape or form. This in turn led me to spending rather too much time reading there, which has left my soul abraded*, and I am none the wiser as to how the link came about. I won't put in a link to the Spectator as I feel that would only make things worse. Fortunately they have just told me I need to subscribe to read any more, which will put a stop to my masochism. Though of course there's always the incognito window option, which is a useful way of getting round subscription-free limits (though don't tell anyone I told you and please spare me the moralising about paying for content, mea culpa, etc) and also those times when you can't quite resist reading something somewhere like the Daily Mail or Breitbart but you don't want anyone, not even an algorithm, to know. But be warned, you will still feel dirty. Also, you can't get Adblock.

So, I think I will just raid my Pinterest miscellaneous board to cheer myself up:

always mean to make some of these when I go to the beach, but never remember. We don't have many pebbles like this on our local beaches mind. These are set up and taken by Scottish photographer Iain Blake.

Sagrada Familia. Never been there, may do one day but I don't have much yen to go south any more. (Came via tumblr, but watermarked by the photographer).

Samuel Salcedo, apparently.

Street art, can't seem to track this one's origins down. There's some wonderful street art on Pinterest. I wish I had the kind of mind that could see the potential in things like this.

And finally something really cuddly and heartwarming. Hope they've both had their flea drops.

* liberal cry-baby, and proud.

Elfin Friday: keep them doggies rolling

Pick it up

chew it up

Chew it up

Spit it out

Pick it up

Chew it up,

Rawhide!

~

Such a joy to have a dog who takes anything good to chew or eat without fuss, but with glee and appreciation, who doesn't guard or control or toy with but concentrates on and finishes things. One of the benefits of a harder life before perhaps. Yet I could take it out of her mouth without any argument if need be, even though that mouth is full of carpet knives, and she totally looks like a wild beast while she's chewing it.

Our friendly, big-guy gardener who comes to cut the hedges, about whom she gave a rare, deep, warning bark when he loomed up at the French doors, came in and made a great fuss of her, let her jump up, cuddled her and slapped her ribs and told her how beautiful she was, all much to her delight, though she didn't get silly and came over to us for affirmation straight away. Then he started teasing a bit by saying ' où sont les lapins, où est le chat?', and at the word 'chat' she immediately became agitated, looking up at the window and tensing her body. So someone has clearly encouraged anxiety, chasing and predatory behaviour towards cats, which makes it more of a problem to overcome. Similarly when Susie, her trainer, got out a long thin stick to show how she might learn 'touch it' training, such as assistance dogs learn, Elfie perceptibly flinched and ducked. Which makes it all the more remarkable and touching that she is, in general, such a brave, cheerful, adaptable and affectionate dog.

Throwback Thursday - Chapman's Dam

When I was four, in 1966, I went with my parents to stay with my Auntie Joan's family in Pennsylvania. We went there again when I was thirteen, the second time my nearest brother came too, but this first time, my being just a foal at foot and not yet at school, it was just me. I had a lovely time; I was considered cute and a honey, made much of by everyone from the pilot of the Aer Lingus plane that took us there who sat me on his knee in the cockpit (that was possible then), to New York hotel maids and men working on the streets to my teenage American cousins and their buddies. 

The picture was taken at a place we called Chapman's Dam. I just googled it and in fact it's actually Chapman Dam, and is still there, of course. I remember it as a sunny place with little beaches and barbecue and picnic tables. I appear to be being fed marshmallows, probably by my cousin Honey, who was really called Marjy after my mum. I don't know who the little girl behind me was, I vaguely remember another child I was friendly with.

Joan was my mother's only sister, she had gone to live in America at the end of the Second World War, because she was a GI bride. Uncle Lloyd, her husband, who for some reason we often knew as Uncle Kit, had been stationed in Northamptonshire where the Cutmores (my mum's family) then lived, he also went to France, maybe for the Normandy landings, I should probably know more about where, when and how as one of my American cousins has been researching it and even made it over here very briefly in the last year or so but I didn't get to see him, but I forget the details. I think Lloyd finished up in Brest so he must have been through Brittany, and thus the cross-hatching of historical coincidence shows itself again there in a small way.

This was the first time the two sisters had seen each other in that time, twenty years almost exactly. It was certainly an exciting thing for them. As always there was, well, history: little bits of grit of bitterness, rivalry, jealousy, diverging accounts of How Things Happened, hurt and soreness around my Gran, their mother, and how she saw and treated each of them. It was wartime and a hard time for all of them, and everyone too sad and reproachful to easily see the other's point of view.  Yet the two sisters supported each other too, made clothes and food and were company for each other and their children, they named their daughters after each other. Joan was altogether a sweeter, easier person than my mum, less sharp (in both senses), more rounded at the corners; once when we talked about her, after the second visit, Mum said she saw her besetting sin as a kind of laziness. She didn't mean idleness, Joan was hardworking, creative, resourceful, handy and outgoing, as Mum would have been the first to acknowledge, but I think she saw in her a kind of complacency, a deeper rooted shiftlessness which didn't try to analyse or criticise or change things much. More kindly it might be seen as acceptance, patience, a sanguine temperament. But Mum not being like that herself, didn't see it like that. 

I loved being in America, both times. My impression of life there was of abundance, though Joan and Lloyd were always quite poor, I think, financially and lived rather hand to mouth. Yet there was a pile of toys for me when I got there, looked out from the attic or donated by friends of the family, which were wonderfully different from anything I'd seen at home, someone bought me some guppies which swam around in a glass vase on the windowsill much to my fascination, there were chickens and dogs, and somewhere else, some friends' farm I think, maybe the family which my eldest cousin finally married into, where there were piles of young puppies and kittens I was allowed to stroke, and an old blind man who asked to be allowed to touch my face to see me with his hands, which I also liked. There was open house at weekends (I think that was more the second time) with huge amounts of food cooked and served, most of it home grown, and when my mum queried whether it was quite reasonable that so many people should descend on the place expecting to be fed, Joan was quite affronted. 

They visited us a couple of times afterwards, including to come for Az's wedding when I was fifteen. Joan died about ten years ago. We had kept in touch on and off; I rang her when my Mum died, perhaps ten years before, and she told me I was a brave girl to make that call.