IT'S ALL THE FAULT OF JOHN CALCOTT HORSLEY OF TORQUAY - IN 1843
HE PRINTED THE FIRST CHRISTMAS CARD, AND HERE AM I, 164 YEARS LATER TRYING TO GET THIS YEAR'S BATCH IN THE POST ASAP.





READING:

Minette Walters is one of Britain’s best-selling crime/thriller writers, and I have enjoyed several of her books. They all fall into the psychological thriller genre, and The Chameleon’s Shadow is her most recent book, having been published in October this year, so it is not yet available in paperback.

It was rather coincidental that I picked this up at the library, just after having ranted in my last blog post about injured servicemen being abused at a local leisure centre. The main character in the book is a young army officer who has just been serving in Iraq. Lieutenant Charles Acland has survived a bomb on the road between Baghdad and Basra, the two soldiers under his command who were with him were not so fortunate; however Acland has been horribly injured, and therein lies the plot. From the moment he comes to consciousness in a British Military hospital it seems as if what has happened to him has changed his personality dramatically, and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, anti-social and unpredictable particularly towards women.

Meanwhile, in London there have been a series of brutal murders. Several men have been violently battered to death, and the police are baffled. When Acland is eventually released from hospital, and is discharged from the army on the grounds of his disabilities, he gravitates to London where he eventually comes to the notice of the police and is linked with the latest in this series of killings following a violent altercation with a man in a pub. Could he have committed the murders ? can he control the rage boiling up inside him? I don’t want to give any spoilers here, suffice to say that the plot becomes increasingly complex and twisted, and the reader is never quite sure where it will go next.

What I found particularly interesting about this book was the first part when Acland is still in the hospital and having many sessions with the resident psychiatrist. Walters really makes the reader think about what can happen to young men (and women) who go to war, and how, if a career in the army (or any other of the forces) has been your life plan it is totally devastating when, in addition to disfiguring and handicapping injuries, that is taken away from you. Reading this I could see how it happens that many of the homeless people on the streets of Britain are ex-military.

Rated: 3.5*

RANTING:

Bear with me whilst I have a little rant about rape. Rape is a nasty word, a nasty word for a nasty deed. I can remember, as a girl, hearing it referred to as “a fate worse than death”, and maybe for some women that seems to be true. In real life, death is the only final fate, and therefore there can never be a fate that is ‘worse’ than death. But I digress….

The reason I want to rant about rape is because the government, in the person of the Solicitor General, Vera Baird, announced a week ago that they were not satisfied with the rate of convictions for rape in the UK and therefore they planned to implement certain measures to increase the conviction rate.

When first I read this proposal I thought ‘fine, ok, that seems sensible’; but then I started thinking about what was really being said.

In this country a person is innocent of a charge brought against him/her until they are PROVED guilty beyond doubt. So in the case of rape and the conviction rates, is the Government saying that they KNOW that all persons accused of this heinous crime are actually guilty but are not being convicted by the courts? Because that is the implication of their recent statements –which goes against everything that the law in this country has stood for – namely, presumption of innocence.

Of course I realise that to prove a case of rape is never easy. Usually it is the word of one person against another with no witnesses. So it is likely that there are cases where rapists manage to get themselves acquitted, and that is horrible. Horrible for the person who was raped, and potentially horrible for others who may then suffer the same fate if the rapist strikes again.

Never-the-less, we change the law at our peril.

The Government is concerned about the number of reported rapes which fail to lead to a conviction. This means that a low number of allegations of rape made to and recorded by the police actually end up with the rapist being found guilty in a court of law. This is not because the courts are any softer on alleged rapists than they ever were, but because many of the reported rapes never make it to court at all. Of those that do, the conviction rate is nothing like as low.

I suspect that these proposed changes are due to three things: (1) Emotion – rape is a very emotive issue; (2) Government obsession with ‘targets’ in all aspects of national life, and 3. a huge widening of the definition of rape in Britain.

It is true that most women who are raped (and it is usually women) are raped by someone they know, a friend, a family member, a work colleague, a neighbour. Or a woman may well be raped by her own husband.
But I have grave concerns about the new view that someone who goes out and gets themselves totally legless, so that they cannot recall whether or not they consented to sexual intercourse, should be able to then cry ‘rape’. They must carry some responsibility for what occurred, even if in retrospect they are shocked, appalled, ashamed or concerned.

RECIPE:

My DD is the muffin maker in our family, and has a huge repertoire of delicious muffin recipes; but from time to time I do venture into her territory, and last week when I had to take a contribution to a morning get-together I decided to try something new so made a batch of these. All I can say is that they vanished off the plate so fast I had hardly sipped my cappuccino before they were gone!

TOFFEE-APPLE MUFFINS

Makes 12

350g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground mixed spice (or cinnamon)
240g golden caster sugar
3 dessert apples, peeled, cored and finely chopped
3 large eggs, beaten
120ml vegetable oil
100ml milk
150g SOFT toffees, chopped into small pieces - it is essential to use soft toffees as hard ones take forever to chop up.

1 Preheat the oven to 180C and line a 12-hole muffin tray with paper cases. Sift the flour, baking powder and mixed spice into a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Make a well in the dry ingredients.

2 Add the chopped apples,toffee pieces, eggs, oil and milk in the middle of the well, and fold the mixture together with a large metal spoon, using as few strokes as possible. Don’t worry if the mixture is lumpy, the trick behind the lightest muffins is not to overwork the batter.

3 Fill the paper cases with the mixture, then bake for 25-30 minutes or until the muffins are well risen and golden.

MOOCHING ABOUT IN THE BLOGOSPHERE EARLY THIS MORNING I stumbled across this wonderful newish website called TwitterLit. It is just what every voracious reader will enjoy, and a terrible time waster, but on the other hand, as a result of reading the first lines I have added six books to my "Must Read" list. Try it out, you'll love it too....

READING:

Yesterday I fancied reading something undemanding, and picked up Joanna Trollope's latest book ‘Second Honeymoon’. Actually it sounds rather disparaging to call it ‘undemanding’ as although it was not a difficult read it was by no means the sort of book that some critics refer to patronisingly as “women’s fiction”.

Edie, the fifty-plus protagonist is an actress and mother of three grown-up children, the youngest of whom, Ben, has just left home aged 22 to live with his girlfriend. Edie feels totally bereft by his departure and desparately wants him to come back, whereas her husband Russell is looking forward to having her to himself again after so many years. Whilst struggling to come to terms with this new stage of her life, Edie auditions for one of the main roles in an avante-garde production of a play by Ibsen, and to her surprise gets the part. She starts “mothering“ Lazlo the young unknown actor who is playing the part of her son, and as he is in need of somewhere to live, she invites him to lodge with her and Russell. At the same time, her eldest son Matthew breaks up with his financially successful and ambitious girlfriend Ruth, and returns to live at home for a while; no sooner has that happened than her daughter Rosa loses her job, and after a few weeks living with Edie’s sister, she too returns home. Finally Ben her youngest moves back, but as the house is full he has to doss on the sofa. Edie has got what she wanted, her children back under her roof, but it is nothing like she expected to be. They are all adults now, with lives of their own; she becomes increasingly frustrated and exhausted trying to manage her own life in the theatre, and keep the household running with some semblance of order. Slowly she comes to realise that she actually wants to let them go.

Trollope is particularly good at the nuances of family relationships and I really empathised with Edie; being of the same age, having one adult child who left home and then after some years has come back to live with us just at the moment when my DH and I were planning to move to a smaller home, I could feel how emotionally torn she was.Two of the most interesting minor characters in the book are Ruth, Matthew’s high flying girlfriend, and Rosa’s best friend Kate who has just had a baby. Trollope cleverly juxtaposes the alpha and omega of motherhood, from the beginning when a baby requires constant mothering, to the stage where the day-to-day care of a mother is no longer needed or wanted, and how hard it is for women to adjust to both stages.

A much grittier, more complex book than earlier books by Joanna Trollope, and not an Aga in sight.

RANTING;

Holy Smoke! Can you believe it - this Nanny state has legislated that
Churches and Cathedrals should display a big notice on their doors to say that smoking is forbidden in the said Church or Cathedral. Oh, and by the way, this crazy piece of legislation also applies to Synagogues, Hindu Temples, Mosques and other places of religious worship.

Why? When did you last see anyone light up a ciggie in church?(or synagogue, temple, mosque etc) Yes, you are correct, you have NEVER seen anyone smoking in church. So why do they need the signs?
Jobsworth at the various Local Authorities I asked said " it will be against the law, and so people must be informed" and those responsible for places of religious worship have been told they will be prosecuted if they don't put such signs up.
What a weird world Nu Labour has inflicted on us; signs on the doors of churches (cathedrals, temples,, synagogues, mosques etc) telling people that they may not smoke within, WHEN NOBODY EVER DID SO WITHIN LIVING MEMORY.

Hang on a minute - murder is against the law and the churches (cathedrals, temples, syn...oh for heavens sake you know the places) do not have big signs on their doors banning murder on the premises. Nor do they have signs listing all the other legal prohibitions that may not take place on the premises; there would be very, very long lists pinned to church doors if they applied the same logic as they have done to the smoking ban.

Call me a cynical old bat if you like (but not to my face please), but I sense a job-creation scheme going on; this will create a whole new tier of local council employees all self-righteously checking out that the notices are in place and getting paid for so doing , paid with OUR money.

I should just add, that I don't smoke, I don't like being in smoky places, and I hardly ever go to church - but I just think this whole nonsense is symtomatic of a society that is being overly regulated ; and I wish I had shares in some of the companies making mega-bucks from producing all these bloody signs.

RECIPE:

I have never understood people who use packet cake mixes - so if you are one of them forgive me if I seem rude, but What Is the Point??? I have a girlfriend who always used a pack of Betty Crocker when making her children's birthday cakes, for some reason I was too polite to ask her why she didn't just make a cake in the normal way. A "real" homemade cake takes as little time to make as a packet mix, by the time you've added all the things the manufacturers ask for; and the actual success or failure of the cake will be determined by the oven temperature, timing etc. The chocolate cake recipe below is tried and tested. I must have made it 30-40 times and it is consistantly good. It takes less than 20 minutes to make (not including baking time). So an hour after you have a yen for a choccy cake you can have one, freshly made and iced, how difficult is that?

I have made this cake over and over again, for school fetes, for birthdays, anniversaries, sales-of-work, charity sales etc, etc; so when new neighbours moved into the house next door at the weekend, what could be a more perfect welcome presentation than a chocolate cake and a bottle of champers!

FAVOURITE QUICK CHOCOLATE CAKE

Grease and base line 2 x 18cm sponge tins
Pre-heat oven to 180°C

115g caster sugar
115g soft margarine
115g self-raising flour
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder

3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon instant coffee granules
4 tablespoons hot water

Put the flour, sugar, margarine, both eggs and the baking powder together in a mixing bowl.
In a cup mix together the cocoa, coffee and hot water so they become a sloppy paste.
Add the cocoa mix to the other ingredients in the mixing bowl.
Beat all together with an electric mixer for a minute or so until they are well mixed and of a soft dropping consistency.
Divide the cake mix evenly between the two prepared tins, spreading it out so the edges are slightly higher than the centre.
Rap each tin on the work surface to remove any large air bubbles, and then bake on the centre shelf of the preheated oven for between 18 -25 minutes until the cakes are shrinking from the sides of the tins, and the centre is firm and slightly springy to touch.
Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack whilst making the icing.

FUDGY CHOCOLATE ICING

85g icing sugar 30g cocoa powder
55g caster sugar 45g soft margarine 2 tablespoons water

Sieve the icing sugar and cocoa powder together into a bowl.
Put the caster sugar, margarine and water together into a small saucepan, and heat until the sugar is dissolved and the margarine is melted, then bring to a boil, boil for a minute and remove from the heat.
Pour the margarine, sugar, water mixture onto the icing sugar and stir together and then beat hard until smooth and beginning to thicken.

Place one of the cakes on a serving plate (upper side downward) and spread icing over it. Cover with the second cake, and spread the remaining icing evenly over the top. If the icing is firming up too rapidly, dip a knife in hot water and use that to spread it smoothly. Decorate as wished.

CAST NE'ER A CLOUT TIL MAY BE OUT so the old saying has it - well the hawthorn blossom has been well and truly out for ages, in fact those Darling Buds of May have bloomed and gone, along with my Irises, and some of my roses too....what will be left to bloom come the summer?

READING:

I’m a huge fan of Anne Tyler, so when a friend lent me a copy of her latest (her 17^th) novel: Digging to America, it didn’t join the teetering pile of books waiting to be read, I dived in straight away. I wasn’t disappointed.

In 1997 two very different families meet at Baltimore airport. The Donaldsons are very much the quintessential middle American couple, and the Yazdans are Iranian-Americans. Both families are at the airport to receive their newly adopted baby daughters who are arriving from South Korea, and from this unlikely start, a strong friendship begins between them. Bitsy Donaldson is the earth mother type, a former yoga teacher and weaver, she is very sure of herself and how to bring up her new daughter. She and her husband retain the child’s Korean name Jin-Ho, dress her in Korean clothes on high days and holidays, read her Korean folk tales, Bitsy is determined to be culturally sensitive at all costs. Sami and Ziba Yazdan on the other hand are first generation born Iranian-Americans, they instantly change their daughter’s name to Susan, and do all they can to get her to be assimilated as a true American.

On the first anniversary of the babies’ arrival Bitsy throws an “Arrival Party” complete with a cake iced to look like the Stars and Stripes, a video of the scene at the airport, and a jolly anthem. The Yazdans are of course invited to the party as Jin Ho and Susan arrived on the same plane. The following year it is the Yazdans who hold the “Arrival Party” with the same video and song and a vast buffet of Iranian food. From then on, the two families host the party on alternate years as the girls grow up, and the description of the parties serves to point out how the Yazdan’s are becoming more and more American even as Bitsy is trying to keep her daughter culturally separate. As the book progresses, the main character emerges almost from the sidelines, Maryam Yazdan, the mother of Sami and adopted grandmother to Susan. Even after 35 years as an American citizen she feels herself to be an outsider, and stands aloof observing the cultural dislocation of the Iranians, and both admiring and being repelled by contemporary American life.

Lighter in tone than some of Tyler’s previous novels, it is a wonderful dissection of identity, both national and personal, and an often hilarious take on suburban middle America.

It was only after finishing the book that I discovered that Anne Tyler’s late husband was Iranian, and from him and his family she must have gained the insight into the yawning gaps that lie between the two cultures, just waiting to trip the unwary.

Rated 4.5*

RANTING:

What do all these pictures have in common? And why would the dreaded gauleiters of Dorset County Council's Trading Standards Department be on the case of one of them? No idea? Here's a clue. There are NO Shepherds used in the making of Shepherd's Pie.
There are NO 'dicks' - spotted or otherwise - used in the making of Spotted Dick.
There are NO toads used in the making of Toad-in-the-Hole.
We are all used to funny peculiar names for certain foods, they are part of our culinary tradition and we don't expect the name of the food to be an exact list of the actual ingredients. We are not fools. Recently Val Temple who has run the Sgt Bub Bakery in Weymouth for almost 30 years was paid a visit by the local Trading Standards Inspectors who said that "someone" had made a complaint that the names of the cakes didn't relate to what was in them. What, you mean they had really thought that the Robin tarts, the Pig Tarts, (just like her Froggie tart pictured here) contained Robin and pork and that the Paradise Slice came from Paradise? Oh what baloney, I don't believe anyone complained at all, I think this was just some under-employed, thick as pig-shit, meddlesome little jobsworth in the Trading Standards department causing trouble.
Ivan Hancock, the county's trading standards manager, said: "The fact is that food needs to be properly described so that the consumer can tell what it is."
Oh, that's consumers from Outer Mongolia or Mars is it? the rest of us know fine well that when we buy a little jam sponge tart iced with the picture of a robin redabreast and called - logically - Robin Tart, that it has no real robins in it. Presumably if it DID have robins in it the Trading Standards w***kers would be satisfied, but then the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would be breathing down Mrs Temples neck before she could sing "Rockin' robin, tweet, tweet."
Don't these people (paid for by the great British public by the way) have better things to do, like sort out dodgy car dealers, Nigerian scamsters, and crooks selling counterfeit perfume? Renaming cakes at reputable local bakery is just ludicrous.
I bet they'll be round at the local Indian take-away having words about Bombay Duck in a day or two.

RECIPE:
At this time of year the strawberries which are piled up in the supermarkets are all from abroad, and don't have the flavour that makes you want to eat them unadorned, however they are ideal with other ingredients.
I had 10 for dinner last Saturday, and having seen some rather large Spanish strawberries (which were reduced in price) and the tail end of the fresh rhubarb, I decided to combine them in these individual tarts. Strawberries and rhubarb are a combination made in heaven; when I was first married, my late M-i-L told me her tip of adding a couple of tablespoons of strawberry jam to rhubarb when stewing it or making crumble - deeelish!
I originally spotted this recipe in an execellent food blog called Joy of Baking, and tried it out on the family who gave it the thumbs-up.

RHUBARB & STRAWBERRY TARTS

Makes 8 individual tarts

Pastry:
400g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 rounded tablespoon caster sugar
230g chilled butter cut into pieces
60ml cold water

Filling:
500g rhubarb (only use the really pink/red sticks of rhubarb)
500g strawberries
50g plain flour
200g granulated sugar

Pulse the flour, salt and butter together in a food processor until it looks like white breadcrumbs (this only takes seconds, don’t overdo it). Add the sugar and whiz together briefly. With machine running add the water and process until it forms a smooth ball of pastry. Wrap in greaseproof paper and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. If you want, you can make the pastry the previous day to save time.

Wipe the sticks of rhubarb and cut off the green ends of the sticks; then cut into 2cm pieces. Hull the strawberries and if they are large cut them up so they are similar in size to the rhubarb. Mix together the flour and sugar. In a large bowl mix the rhubarb and strawberry pieces and then the flour+sugar mix; make sure all the pieces of fruit are well coated.

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C

Take the chilled pastry and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll each piece out to form a circle approx 18cms in diameter. Trim the edges. Line two baking trays with baking parchement. One by one place the pastry circles on the baking trays, filling each one with about ½ cup of the fruit mix which you spread out to within 4-5 cms of the edge and then fold the pastry up around the filling, pleating and pinching it together but leaving the central part of the tart open.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is soft and bubbling.
Remove from the oven onto a wire rack. Serve at room temperature or very slightly warm, with either some crème fraiche or a scoop of vanilla icecream.

SPRING HAS SPRUNG, DA GRASS HAS RIZ,
I WONDER WHERE DA BOIDIES IS?
DA LITTLE BOIDS IS ON DA WING,
WELL HOW ABSOID,
I TOIT DA WINGS WAS ON DA BOID.

Did anyone else learn this little rhyme when they were young? I was told that it was to emulate the New York accent of those who were born and raised in the Bronx - I don't know if that is true, but today is a beautiful sunny Easter Sunday and the rhyme just popped into into my mind.

READING:

A tale of murder and intrigue set in the Canadian wilderness in the year 1867, The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney is partly narrated by Mrs Ross who finds the body of Laurent Jammet in a cabin on the edge of the small isolated settlement of Dove River. When her missing adopted son of 17 is suspected of being the murderer she sets off to try and find him despite the fact that the winter is beginning to take its grip on the land. She is fortunate to have the assistance of a half-breed Native American trapper to assist her through the harsh environment. Together they overcome the difficult situations that arise, and manage to find Francis Ross and eventually track down the real killer.

The novel has various other sub-plots, involving harsh religious communities who have settled in the wild, the ruthless monopoly on fur-trading held by the Hudson Bay Company, and the problems between immigrants and the native Americans, with racism and homophobia thrown in for good measure.

I must admit I found myself plodding through this book, and it left me cold – not surprising really when there are pages of descriptions of snowy wastes, frozen lakes and wild blizzards. The female characters all seemed to be rather too modern in their manner and behaviour for the time the story was set, and I can’t say I warmed to them or any of the other characters particularly. In the end it didn’t seem too important who had killed the victim, and the story just seemed to fizzle out.

I know many readers have absolutely loved the book, and it won the Costa Award for best First Novel this year, but on reading it I felt that it had been hyped up by the publicity; and I’m not sure why the book has the title it does – other than the fact it is quite a catchy phrase for a title per se – as wolves, tender or otherwise, hardly feature in the book at all.

Maybe you will enjoy it more than I did
Rated 3*

RANTING:
Our political masters must be using a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 as their guide to government because their latest mad concept is straight out of the totalitarian hell depicted by him. Talking CCTV cameras in public places. I kid you not.
The plan is to recruit children* to harangue citizens who are observed breaching any minor bye-law. If for example you are out walking in the local High Street with your doddery old auntie and she drops a tissue by mistake , a voice will shout out over the area from the CCTV camera calling her a litter lout and ordering her to pick it up.
Who will decide what situations are worthy of intervention by the voice of authority?
Do we really want to live in a surveillance society?

Apparently a pilot scheme using this latest whiz-bang piece of technology has been tried out in Middlesborough - and now they want it all over the country and are prepared to spend half a million on it. If people want public spaces to feel safer, then a talking camera is no substitute for the presence of a real life policeman or policewoman.

* I am totally opposed to this scheme however they implement it, but to suggest using children to tell people off is truly ghastly. It reminds me of the scenes during Mao's Cultural Revolution in China where school children and other young people harangued and tormented their elders for supposed infractions of thought, word and deed.

RECIPE:
Within walking distance of one of the courts I sit at as a magistrate there is a pub called The Widow's Son. The story behind the name of this pub is that many years ago there was a widow living in Bromley-by-Bow who had a sailor son. He was due home from sea for Easter and his mother made some Hot Cross Buns for him. When he did not arrive she hung the buns from the beams of the pub to await his return. The following year she did the same thing....sad to say he never did return, but every year another Hot Cross Bun was added to those hanging from the beams, this has continued for over 150 years and the tradition continues to this day. Every Good Friday there is a short service in the pub and a sailor adds a new bun to the collection.

I know that these days you can buy Hot Cross Buns in every supermarket and corner shop all year round, but they are really much nicer if you make them yourself and not difficult at all. This is the recipe I use, I like my buns to have quite a bit of spice, you might prefer less.

HOT CROSS BUNS

(makes 8)

250g strong white or wholemeal flour
½ teaspoon mixed spice
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
A good pinch of salt

5 tablespoons caster sugar
2½ teaspoons easy bake dried yeast (I always use Allinsons)
60g currants
60g chopped mixed peel
260ml milk
60 ml melted butter

For the crosses:
2 tablespoons white flour, 2 tablespoons water, ½ teaspoon cooking oil

To glaze the buns:
2 tablespoons milk, 1 tablespoon caster sugar mixed together until the sugar has dissolved.

Put the flour, sugar, spices and salt into a large mixing bowl; stir in the currants, peel and dried yeast. Mix to a soft dough with the milk and butter, then turn onto a floured surface and knead well for 10 minutes.

Divide the dough into 8 pieces, shape each piece into a flattish round bun and place on a greased baking sheet. Cover with a clean tea towel.

Leave in a warm place to prove until the buns have doubled in size.

Pre-heat the oven to 200°

While the dough is proving mix together the white flour, water and a cooking oil (not olive oil) to form a smooth paste. Using a piping bag, pipe a cross onto each bun.

Brush the buns with the milk and water glaze.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden.

USE IT UP, WEAR IT OUT, MAKE IT DO, OR DO WITHOUT... I'm tightening my belt in March.

READING:
You and I , dear blog reader, are very fortunate, we have our sight so we are able to read the printed word - indeed you are reading this post. In the past three years I have had some serious problems with my left eye resulting in several operations which have saved my sight and for that I am very, very grateful. To be unable to read is one of the things I most dread, so when I came upon this piece written on Dovegreyreader's blog it went straight to my heart:

My name is Clare Gailans. I am totally blind and have used braille as my means of literacy since starting school at five, that's to say for over 40 years. I have always told people what a wonderful system braille is, and had imagined it would always be offered to those who need to use it to read. Technology makes it very much quicker to produce now, and the Disability Discrimination Act requires information to be produced in it if it is the most appropriate format for the recipient.
This is all very well for us adults, but it is becoming clear that shortages of qualified personnel, money, or perhaps just plain arrogance, are creating a situation in many mainstream schools where blind children are not taught braille, and those with useful sight are often denied it until their sight has further deteriorated. By this time many of them already hate reading, which is a huge extra strain on them throughout the school day - a stressful time for many children at the best of times.

Apart from the people close to me, books are my first love and I came to them through braille. Books can be listened to with enjoyment, but this is not literacy. I could not have enjoyed sharing my love of books with others through email, or made virtual friends with so many lovers of books such as Lynne, without being able to write, spell and punctuate. Listening to voices as a poor second to literacy would not have taught me these things.
Without first learning to read words I could not have mastered music through braille notation, which has been the key to my employment for the past 25 years, and my obtaining a degree in music from Cambridge before that. Braille has also been the difference for my husband and me, through such activities as music and chess, between being merely tolerated in the sighted community and being fully accepted, indeed sometimes looked up to, for our contributions.
It has helped me in a variety of voluntary activities, and to instil a love of reading in our two sighted children. I could not run our household efficiently witout it, in every department from cooking to labelling the many reams of paper which have to be filed, and which without braille would all feel identical."
There is an online petitionto ask the government to make the teaching of braille available for all blind and partially sighted people which I have signed - it can be signed by any UK citizens and I sincerely hope you will consider doing so. As tomorrow is World Book Day it seemed particularly appropriate to consider how much the ability to read means to me, rather than to talk about a particular book.

RANTING:
No music on a summers evening at Kenwood this year. Well I can’t say I mind too much, over the past few years the summer concerts have become just big noisy overblown events that we no longer attend.

For 55 years there have been outdoor musical concerts by the lake at Kenwood House, a beautiful neo-classical house on the northern slopes of Hampstead Heath in north London. As we live fairly close by, my DH and I, our children, friends and neighbours used to go to one or two concerts each season; we’d pack a picnic, several bottles of wine, some rugs, cushions, and black bin liners (in case the weather turned wet) and troop off to lie on the grass with other north Londoners and enjoy the music which was always of a very high standard. One or two of the concerts each year would end with a firework display.

Then, some years ago, English Heritage took over the management of Kenwood House and its grounds. Tents selling various overpriced drinks started appearing on either side of the grassy slope where most people sat and picnicked. The ticket prices went up steeply. The concerts started to have fireworks more frequently. From being concerts of classical or chamber music with the occasional foray into opera or jazz, they became more populist. Last season had, amongst other delights, Art Garfunkel and His Band, Sinatra Under The Stars, The Time of Your Life – The Music of Dirty Dancing, The Four Seasons, Dancing in the Streets - The Music of Motown. Corporate Hospitality tents sprang up to enable businesses to entertain their clients at the concerts. As if that were not enough, the concerts started being advertised very widely, and coach loads of visitors came from as far afield as Guildford and Milton Keynes. In the past few years English Heritage has been selling 10,000 tickets for every concert. Ten thousand people at Kenwood – it was getting ridiculous - far, far too many; they usually came by car, and the streets on all sides of the Heath were clogged with traffic and people trying to park. To match the expectations of audiences paying the higher ticket prices, and coming from far and wide, the music started to be amplified with special hi-tech equipment, so that it could be heard by everyone who lived in the vicinity and some distance away too. Local residents finally had enough and complaints to the local council started to snowball. Finally, Camden Council have ruled that they will only grant English Heritage a license for eight concerts this year, not ten, and they must cut the ticket numbers to 8,000 per concert. English Heritage grumpily says that is not economically viable, so they will not put on any concerts at all.

They have killed what used to be a wonderful summer tradition through sheer greed.

RECIPE:
Who says you can’t teach an old ‘dog’ new tricks? A dear friend was celebrating his 60^th last weekend, and I was asked to make the birthday cake – specifically a carrot cake. Well, I have made more carrot cakes than I’ve had hot…well, maybe not QUITE that many, but a fair few over the years. I have always used the same tried and trusted carrot cake recipe and I’ve never had any complaints. However, for some perverse reason I decided to abandon my usual recipe and instead to use the recipe I'd read on another blog. Some months ago, Reluctant Nomad posted his carrot cake recipe on his blog, and so I tried it out. All I can say is, it is the BEST. When you read through it, it seems much like any other carrot cake recipe in terms of ingredients etc, but somehow it turns out to be the Űber Carrot Cake of all time. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not posting a carrot cake recipe, click on the side bar link to find Reluctant Nomad's blog and check his archive for November 7th 2006 to find his recipe.
But I am posting a recipe for the icing which a birthday cake demands!

CREAM CHEESE ICING

175g cream cheese
175g softened butter
250g icing sugar (sieved)
½ teaspoon vanilla essence

Put all the ingredients into a bowl or food processor and beat/whiz together until smooth and creamy.
Spread over the top of the cake - et voila!

IF MOSES SUPPOSES HIS TOESES ARE ROSES, then Moses supposes erroneously;
For nobody's toeses are posies of roses, as Moses supposes his toeses to be.*
Well, I don't know about poor old Moses, but MY toeses are roses - I've just had a pedicure!
*(old English tongue twister)


READING:

The Curry Mile is a first novel by Zahid Hussain. For non UK readers of this blog, I should explain that Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, a suburb of Manchester, has more Asian restaurants than anywhere else in Britain, and is known as the Curry Mile . All the time I was reading this I kept wanting to rush out to the nearest ‘Indian’ restaurant and order a lamb pasanda, tarka dall, and sag paneer, together with a peshwari naan, and some somosas on the side.

Hussain has written a behind-the-scenes view of the cut-throat competition between the restaurant owners in this famous street, and a family story of the conflicting demands faced by the children of migrant parents.

The two main characters are Ajmal Butt, known as ‘The Curry King’, the aging head of a successful restaurant business that is going through hard times, and his twenty-something daughter Sorayah who has become estranged from her family as a result of moving to London and having a relationship with a young man. When she returns to Manchester for the wedding of her best friend Yasmeen, daughter of her father’s arch rival, her father tries to bully her into coming back and working for him but she insists on going her own way. Ajmal has been locked in a feud with another local Muslim restauranter for many years, and both he and his enemy expect their offspring to continue the feud into the next generation, as would have been done in Pakistan.

Hussain dishes up a tale of contemporary British Asian life that is just as spicy as the dishes served in an Indian restaurant, and I found it entertaining and informative – I feel sure that there is a sequel on the way, and that we haven’t heard the last of Sorayah Butt.

I do have one small niggle about the book. In what I am sure is a very accurate representation of the way many British Asians speak, Hussain has included many Pakistani, Urdu, and Arabic words, and a glossary would have been very useful. Publishers take note!

RANTING:

I am just about due for a check up at my dentist, and I hope to goodness I am not faced with these. When reading Charon QC's blog today, I discovered that Colgate have had loads of these face masks printed and are supplying dentists with them. Are they mad? the last thing I want when my mouth is being approached by a man wielding an electric drill is that he be sporting bloody silly cartoon grin.

RECIPE:

Amongst the jars of pickles, pesto, peppadews and anchovies in the fridge I found a jar of mincemeat left over from Christmas mince pies- ok, I realise I wouldn't win the housewife of the year award for leaving it there for so long, but what the heck. I used it up in this recipe which I usually make with dates or dried apricots. Everybody liked them, and they vanished in a flash.

OATY FRUIT SLICES

100g wholemeal flour
125g plain flour
100g porridge oats
75g brown sugar
150g butter, melted

Filling:
350g Dates or dried apricots or figs, chopped fairly small
90ml water
Grated rind of ½ lemon
OR: ¾ jar of mincemeat

Two tablespoons icing sugar

Grease and line a baking tin (27cms x 18cms) with baking paper.

Pre-heat oven to 200°C

Prepare the filling, by placing the chopped dried fruit, water and lemon rind into a saucepan. Heat gently, stirring occasionally until the mixture is soft. If using mincemeat you don’t have to do anything to it.

Combine the other ingredients and mix well together. Sprinkle half this mixture into the tin, spread out and press down well. Spread the dried fruit mix or mincemeat over the base, then sprinkle the remaining oat mix evenly over the filling and press down firmly.

Bake in the oven at 200°C for 20 minutes, until golden brown.
Leave to cool in the tin, when cool sift a little icing sugar over the top, turn out from the tin and cut into slices.

Makes 16 slices

YOU'VE GOT TO ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mister-In-Between!’‘ That's my mantra for the month

READING:
I read Arthur and George by Julian Barnes when it first came out in hardback some 18 months ago, but I thought I would put it on my blog, as it was up for discussion at my bookclub this month. Last year it was short listed for the Booker Prize.

It is a rare event for me to buy fiction in hardback, but the publishers, Jonathan Cape, had chosen to bind it in cloth with a most attractive design embossed on it, so I was seduced! It looks very handsome on a bookshelf.

Happily, the novel lives up to the promise of the cover. The eponymous protagonists are Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author who created Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, an unknown solicitor. The first half of the book sets out their respective lives from childhood to becoming adults; Barnes tells the story in alternate sections from their individual viewpoints, a device he uses all through the book.

A long forgotten miscarriage of justice is the point at which their lives cross. The novel is based on real people and events which were evidently well documented in 1903. George Edalji, son of the Vicar of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire, was arrested, tried and found guilty of the mutilation of a number of horses and cows over a two year period. Edalji’s father is a Parsee by birth and came to England from Bombay as a young man. He was ordained into the Anglican Church, married a Scotswoman and had three children, George being the eldest.

George was sentenced to 7 years in gaol for the crimes, however further mutilations of animals continued in the area, so after three years imprisonment he was released – this was before a Court of Appeal existed in English law. Arthur Conan Doyle, by now knighted, respectable, rich and world famous, takes up George’s cause and determines to get him a free pardon and compensation. He tackles the case in the manner of his doppelganger, Sherlock Holmes, and by cunning investigation coupled with stirring up opinion in the newspapers and parliament he partially succeeds

Barnes stunningly evokes Edwardian England where, behind the Imperial façade, changes are afoot, and his brilliant characterisation, bring Arthur and George to life on the page. Arthur is dynamic, romantic, and positive, whereas George is quiet, diffident, and circumspect. The contrast between the two men is never more obvious than in Arthur’s realisation that the whole case against George has been built on flimsy circumstantial evidence based on racial prejudice, and yet George refuses to admit that any racism has been directed towards him. Neither George nor Arthur are “Englishmen” by blood, but both consider themselves to be so for different reasons. Weaving through the main theme Barnes has also wound the story of Arthur’s long-drawn out love with a young woman who becomes his second wife after the resolution of the Edalji case, and their growing belief in spiritualism.
The two passages of the book that I found absolutely marvellous were the chapter on George’s trial, and the meeting between Arthur and Captain Anson the Chief Constable of Staffordshire. Evidence given in a trial may not be interpreted by a judge and jury in the way that seems obvious to an outside observer, and so events can be twisted to appear very different; this is as true today as it was then, and Barnes has managed to convey it so well. The meeting between Arthur and Anson is so brilliantly written that I was apoplectic with anger at Anson’s patronising arrogant racism – I felt as if I were in the room listening to the conversation.

The final part of the book, after Arthur’s death seemed an unnecessary addendum, and I really thought it could have been dropped with no damage to the book as a whole.
All in all, an excellent book and one that will appeal to both male and female readers, I urge you to get hold of a copy, I’m confident you will enjoy it too.

RANTING:

I have just cut my finger - small cut, tip of forefinger, left hand, if you are interested – and like most cuts on the tip of a finger it bled like b*ggery. In one of the kitchen drawers I keep a pack of sticking plasters for just such a situation, it is a newish pack, and this was the first time I’ve had to use one of the plasters. Well lucky it wasn’t a serious cut or I would have bled to death in the attempt. The plasters are individually sealed in clear plastic. To open one of these clear envelopes with two hands is already difficult, but to try and prise it open with only one hand, whilst trying to keep your finger from dripping blood over your white T-shirt is absolutely impossible. By gripping it between my teeth and trying to rip it apart with my free hand, I finally managed to extract the plaster – by now it was looking rather the worse for wear- I then had to (a) wipe the cut finger clean of blood so the plaster would stick to it, and (b) prise off the two backing strips which cover the sticky part of the plaster – yet again using teeth proved the only reliable method. Finally I managed to get the plaster stuck over the cut, and flopped exhausted into a chair.

Manufacturing sticking plasters must be big business, whole factories devoted to nothing else, company profits dependant on their purchase, Chairmen’s bonuses dependant on annual results etc etc. But, do ANY of these manufacturers do any research on what it takes to put a plaster on a wound? Why can’t they design a product that is easy to use? Come on BandAid, Elastoplast, and the rest, you know who I’m ranting about. I suspect they all have sugar plum visions dancing in their heads of little chaps who have grazed a knee having a plaster lovingly applied by a full-time mummy who kisses it all better at the same time. What about those who have to do it alone? Like me, boo hoo…

RECIPE:

Last March my DH and I were back in SA and we were privileged to have a week in Mpumalanga just on the eastern borders of the Kruger Park. One of my dearest friends who lives in Jo'burg sent us off with a huge cold box full of food for the first two days - amongst the other goodies- cold roast chicken, lasagne, and fruit salad - was a pack of these Brownies she'd made. DH and I ended up squabbling like 5 year olds over the last one, they are soooooo good. She kindly gave me the recipe. I've just made a batch for my son and nephew - and boy, am I popular - you could be popular too, make some soon and you'll see what I mean.

SARAH’S CHOCOLATE BROWNIES – The best ever!!!

200gm butter
½ cup cocoa powder
2 cups soft brown sugar
1 teaspn vanilla essence
1 cup plain flour
2 eggs
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Pre-heat oven to 180 C

Grease a 30cm x 20cm baking tin and line base with greaseproof paper.
Melt butter and cocoa powder together in a large pan but don’t boil the mixture.
Add the sugar and vanilla essence – stir really well
Take the pan off the heat, add the flour and mix it in.
Add the eggs – beat them in really well.
Add the chopped nuts and stir them in.
Spread the mixture evenly into the baking tin. Bake at 180°C for 20-25 mins.
Turn out onto a rack when cooked. Allow to cool.

Ice with any chocolate icing (optional), and cut into squares.

Makes about 16.