HAVE JUST SPENT HALF AN HOUR PAIRING SOCKS, AND WONDERING WHERE THE MISSING ONES ARE. IT'S ONE OF LIFE'S MYSTERIES.

The Sorrow of Socks by Wendy Cope

Some socks are loners -
They can't live in pairs.
On washdays they've shown us
They want to be loners. They puzzle their owners,
They hide in dark lairs.
Some socks are loners -
They won't live in pairs.

READING:

I love Ed McBain. To be precise I LOVE Ed McBain’s books, particularly his 87^th Precinct novels. For those of you who have the misfortune not to have heard of Ed McBain, (who died in 2005 to the great sadness of his legions of readers/fans) he was an American crime novelist. His official name was Evan Hunter, he wrote The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for Hitchcock’s film The Birds, and the TV series 'Hill Street Blues' and 'NYPD' are very much based on his books. Ed McBain was a pen name which he used for two series of crime novels and it is the 87^th Precinct novels – and there are more than fifty of them - which are my favourites. The whole series is set in the fictitious city of Isola, which is loosely based on New York.

I read my first 87^th Precinct book way back in the 1960s, I can remember it now, it was a book one of my parents had bought, a Penguin paperback with the green cover that all Penguin crime novels were given, and it’s title was Cop Hater. Within 10 pages I was completely hooked. I read it during a long, dusty, tedious car journey from Lusaka to Cape Town (a journey of 2000 miles) and finished it before we had even reached the South African border. I was desperate to arrive somewhere where there would be a bookshop so that I could find some other books by the same author.

This week I stumbled on his very last book, Fiddlers, which I had not read. Oh joy, oh rapture. I was once again in the company of people I had grown up with, in a city that I know in my mind like the back of my hand.

Fiddlers is a story of a serial killer, and the media dub the deaths ‘The Glock Killings’ as all the victims are shot at point blank range and the gun used is a Glock pistol. The first victim is a blind violin player who works nights at an up-market jazz club. The killing occurs in the 87^th Precinct and so all further killings, wherever in the city they may occur, are also investigated by the detectives of the 87^th; and a varied bunch of victims they are too – a Catholic priest in the grounds of his church, the sixty year old female Professor of Romantic Literature at one of the city universities, a middle-aged sales rep. for manicure products, who is gunned down whilst making a mushroom omelette…! As ever the plot twists and turns and moves on at a cracking pace, the boys in blue try to catch the killer whilst sorting out their own personal lives, the dialogue is lively, funny, tough and accurate, in fact this is a thoroughly good read.

Each book stands alone, but if you read through several you will get to know the detectives personally, and that makes it much more interesting. I feel quite bereft at the thought there will be no more – I think I will have to start at the beginning and read them all again!

Rated: 5*

RANTING:

I am not a member of the huggy-bunny brigade, I am not a vegetarian, I am not against limited and controlled vivisection for the purposes of medical research and to cap it all I would personally repeal the prohibition on fox-hunting. Indeed, I would love to have a couple of hunts tally-ho-ing their way through the urban wastes of north London to help reduce the ever increasing numbers of feral urban foxes with which we are plagued.

So it may come as some surprise that I feel so strongly about Japan’s bloody minded insistence on whaling. Today the Japanese whaling fleet has set out intent on “culling” 1000 whales, including for the first time in many years, 50 of the endangered hump-backed whale. Why are they doing this?

Yes, we know that many years ago the Japanese ate whale meat on a regular basis (as did several other nations), but since the IWC began trying to regulate the hunting of these magnificent mammals , the demand for whale meat has dropped dramatically, so Geishoku Labo, a private firm allied to the Japanese Whaling Association, is deliberately trying to revive it in Japan by supplying cheap whale meat to schools and hospitals. In fact the demand is still so low that there are tonnes of unwanted whale meat stored in warehouses and it is now being supplied to pet food factories. These magnificent, mysterious creatures are being used for pet food – it’s obscene.

The media coverage of the Japanese whaling fleet setting sail kept using the word “cull” but this is no cull, it is slaughter pure and simple. A cull is when there is an unsustainable population of a particular animal, and the numbers must be selectively reduced in order to benefit the whole species. I think that the media should remove the word cull from their coverage immediately – I suspect that the word is the one used by the Japanese whaling industry PR people as a euphemism for what is actually being done.

They say these whales are being killed for “scientific” reasons; they always say that, year after year, what are these so-called “scientific” reasons? Show us the “scientific” results from previous years. Scientific? – bullsh*t; this is a commercial exercise, and yet there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming demand for the resulting product.

If you are Japanese and are reading this, please think about the subject, and approach your parliamentary representative to get it stopped.

RECIPE:

Every so often I make a curry for supper, vegetable or chicken usually, and quite often this is the rice I serve with it . Incredibly simple to make, it tastes authentically Indian, and so it should as the recipe came from Madhur Jaffrey's first ever recipe book published way back in 1982. It makes a bog-standard curry seem very much more special!

INDIAN RICE AND PEAS

Serves 6-8

350g basmati rice
3 tablespoons sunflower oil
1½ teaspoons cumin seeds
100g onion, peeled and finely chopped
200g frozen peas
1 teaspoon salt
700ml water

Heat the oil in a heavy pan over medium heat, and when hot put in the cumin seed, stirring them around for about 5 seconds. Now add the chopped onion and stir fry them until they are flecked with brown spots. Add the rice, peas and salt and continue stirring for 3-4 minutes until they are coated with oil. Pour in the water and bring to the boil. Cover very tightly and turn the heat to very very low. Let it cook for 20 minutes. Turn off the heat but leave the pan to sit, covered and undisturbed for another 8-10 minutes. Do not be tempted to take the lid off to ‘check’ the rice at this stage.

Stir gently before serving

THE PAST 10 DAYS HAVE BEEN STRESSFUL IN THE EXTREME, WE ARE SELLING OUR HOUSE AND SO I SPENT HOURS GETTING IT TO "HOUSE DOCTOR" STANDARD BEFORE HAVING 38 POTENTIAL BUYERS VIEW IT....NOW WE HAVE ACCEPTED AN OFFER. WHEW.


READING:

The Saffron Kitchen is Yasmin Crowther’s first novel, and to a certain extent it fits into the genre I mentioned on the blog back in May when I had just read 'Minaret'.

Set in London and rural Iran, this is the story of Maryam Mazar and her daughter Sara. Maryam was the independent and wilful middle daughter of a well-to-do General in the Shah’s army. She was resistant to his attempts to arrange a marriage for her, as she wanted her own life and then in her late teens she was disowned by her father for having brought dishonour on the family, she was sent away to Tehran and from there she eventually made her way to Britain where she met and married Edward. Sara is their daughter, an only child, she is now a primary school teacher, married and expecting her first child.

When Maryam’s schoolboy nephew Saeed arrives to live with them following the death of his mother in Iran, his arrival sparks off a chain of events. As a result of Maryam’s treatment of Saeed, Sara loses her unborn baby. Racked with guilt Maryam returns to Iran and seeks her past in an isolated rural village called Mazareh which is up in the north-east of the country near the Afghan border. Edward and Sara have been left in London to care for Saeed, and they are distressed and bemused by Maryam’s apparent abandonment of the family.

Sara decides, that she must go to Mazareh herself and bring her mother home. Although she is half Iranian, and can speak some Farsi, she finds Iran a mysterious country which is totally foreign to her, and she is confounded by the primitive lifestyle to which her mother has elected to return. But when Sara meets Ali, the village school teacher, a man with whom her mother had a deep and loving friendship when she was young, she begins to see that Maryam had a previous life of which her family in England were unaware. Just before Sara returns to London Maryam finally tells her of what happened to her all those years ago, and how she and Ali had paid a heavy price for their relationship. Sara finally comes to understand that her mother is a very different woman from how Sara had seen her, and that a long buried secret of love, shame and unhappiness has surfaced to change all their lives.

Yet again I was struck by how women in some societies are so suppressed and how cultural norms tend towards such suppression. We have had a lot of discussion in the British media recently about so called “honour” killings, and in this book Maryam is subjected to unbelievably horrible treatment, ordered by her own father – who is a sophisticated, educated man of the world – and all in the name of honour, or rather, an imagined breach of honour. What Maryam experiences is so dreadful, so emotionally damaging, that it changes her whole personality; and despite her trying to bury the incident in her mind it festers like some tumour until years later it bursts forth.

I thought that the book dealt well with the emotional difficulties of going to live in a country that has a culture very different from what one is used to, and how no matter how successfully someone seems to have assimilated, they will still have a kernel of yearning for their childhood homeland, the homeland of the heart.

REJOICING:

FREE AT LAST!! After 114 days of captivity Alan Johnston is free. Ranting has turned to Rejoicing for today. Frankly my rant seemed petty in the face of good news, so I binned it.

Speaking to the media this morning Alan Johnston compared his captivity with being buried alive, and I can imagine nothing worse than to be held captive by a group of volatile political extremists who threaten to kill you, it must be absolutely terrifying. The group holding him called themselves "The Army of Islam" and seemed to believe that by taking a hostage the British and Israeli Governments would accede to their demands. Johnston must have known that this would never happen - in fact it must never happen - because once goverments cave in and do deals with hostage takers, every one of their citizens becomes a potential hostage.
The big irony in Johnston's situation was that his captors had seized the one man who lived and worked in Gaza and who actually reported on the plight of the Palestinians to the wider world through his BBC broadcasts.
It is terrific for Alan, for his parents, family, friends and colleagues that he is free.
The next piece of great news would be to hear that little Madeline McCann has been found safe and well, but sad to say I think that is far more unlikely.

RECIPE:

I love cumin, and I love meatballs, so when I found this recipe in a newspaper years ago I fell upon it with jdelight and have made it many, many times since.
This is a version of an ancient Iranian/Greek recipe from Asia minor – the sort of simple dish which would have helped feed Xenophon’s army of 10,000 men!

SOUTZOUKAKIA (Lamb and cumin meatballs)

750g minced lamb
2-3 slices good quality bread
1 egg
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Salt & Pepper
4 tablespoons plain flour
3-4 tablespoon sunflower oil

Cut the crusts off the slices of bread and put the slices in a bowl, pour in enough cold water so that the bread is just covered and leave to soak for 10 minutes.
Squeeze the bread dry and place it in a large mixing bowl together with the minced lamb, egg, peeled and crushed garlic, ground cumin and seasoning . Mix together with your hands until all is well blended and silky.

Put the flour into a shallow bowl.

Take a heaped teaspoonful of the lamb mixture, the size of a small walnut, and roll it into a small oval shape with your hands, set aside. Continue doing this until all the mixture is used up, then roll the meatballs in the flour until well coated, shake off excess flour.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and cook the meatballs in batches, turning regularly, until they are lightly golden. Drain them on kitchen paper.

These can be eaten immediately or put in an oven-proof dish together with a good homemade tomato sauce and baked in the oven for 30 minutes then served with rice or noodles. They are also delicious stuffed into warm pitta bread together with a simple salad of tomato, lettuce and onion.

Better late than never.....arghhh, its been days since my last blog, dear reader please forgive me. It has been worrying me that there don't seem to be enough hours in the day to fit everything in, never mind writing a blog. I am going to have to set myself some kind of timetable and NO Gin & Tonic will be allowed if I don't stick to it. Something else will have to give - cleaning the downstairs loo for example!

READING:
Just like my blogging, reading has been relegated to the sidelines by the number of visitors, the number of court sittings, the bathroom renovation etc etc. Having said that, I have enjoyed "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Easy reading, it presented fascinating ideas , statistics and a sideways look at how the world works from a maverick economist at Harvard - ably assisted by a top-rate writer. You might not agree with all the ideas that are presented in the book, but you will certainly have lots to think and talk about. It is a very different perspective on things that is presented in this book. For me the most fascinating section was the one on the primary reason for the rapid decrease in crime in New York...if you thought that that was a result of Mayor Guliani and his zero tolerance policies, think again. Well worth reading.

RANT:
Here in England the outcome of a court case in which a drug dealer was charged with a double murder has been receiving a good deal of press coverage. Three years ago Bertram Byfield, a Jamaican drug dealer living in London, and seven year old Toni-Ann, the little girl he considered his daughter, were shot dead by another violent drug dealer, Joel Smith. The child was shot in the back by Smith, presumably to prevent her being a witness to his having killed her father. A truly henious crime, to shoot a child in cold blood. Smith has been tried and found guilty and will serve a life sentence.
It transpires that Toni-Ann was in the care of Birmingham Social Services at the time of her death, and they have been getting a lot of criticism/blame for what happened to her. What none of the media have really addressed is WHY was this little girl in the care of a local authority in a country far from her mother and other close family? Her mother, who lives in Jamaica had sent her - as a four year old - to the UK on a 'holiday' . Having had a 10 year relationship with Bertram Byfield (who was serving a prison sentence himself when Toni-Ann arrived here) the mother must surely have had some inkling of his involvement with the criminal drug culture. Neither Bertram Byfield nor Toni-Ann were British citizens, and correctly speaking neither of them should have been here at all. Toni-Ann was passed from one set of people to another in Birmingham until she ended up being taken into Care. Byfield then started to make applications to have her with him. Birmingham Social Services were lied to by him, and by his ex-girlfriend who claimed to be Toni-Ann's aunt, and so they permitted the child to move to live with the so-called aunt in London, who immediately passed her over to live with Byfield himself.
Nobody has questioned all the adults - particularly her mother - who used and abused the benefits and advantages of British residence, as to why THEY should not be held to account for what happened to Toni-Ann; why they allowed a man most of them must have known was a violent drug dealer with a criminal record to have her with him. For the press to focus on an overworked social services department is not helpful, they should cut to the root of the problem and condemn the whole Jamaican drug culture which is so damaging our inner cities, THAT is what killed Toni-Ann.



RECIPE:

Cumin is possibly my favourite spice, it is used so widely in cooking, from India through the Middle East to North Africa, and I can't get enough of the taste.
I also love meals which consist of lots of small dishes. 'Meat and two veg' is all very well from time to time, but I prefer tapas, meze, dim sum. Tonight we are having just such a meal and one of the dishes I've made is:

CHICK-PEA, CHILLI & CORIANDER FELAFEL

2 425g cans chick-peas, drained
2 fat cloves garlic, crushed
1 bunch spring onions – white parts only, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 large fresh green chilli, seeded and finely chopped
2 tablespoons fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 egg, beaten
2 tablespoons plain flour
Salt & freshly ground black pepper

Seasoned flour for shaping
Vegetable oil (NOT olive) for shallow frying

Lemon wedges and fresh coriander for garnishing

Tip the drained chick-peas into a food processor or blender, and process until smooth. Add the cumin and ground coriander, garlic and spring onion whites and process again until well mixed.

Turn the mixture into a bowl and stir in the chopped chilli, fresh coriander, beaten egg and flour, mix together well. Season. Mixture should be fairly stiff, if it is too soft add some extra flour and mix again. Cover the bowl and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to firm up.

Using floured hands, shape the mixture into small balls the size of a squash ball, roll each one in the seasoned flour and flatten slightly to make into a patty.
Heat the oil in a frying pan and shallow fry the patties in batches for about one minute each side until they are crisp and golden. Drain on crumpled kitchen paper.

These are delicious served with a tzatziki style dip made from yoghurt, garlic, mint and grated cucumber.