FLITTING DAY

"all that morning a packing up, a sending off, a pushing in—upholstery meeting upholstery in deadly contention; streets encumbered with card-tables and arm-chairs in the most awkward irrelation to their proper circumstances; articles even more sacredly domestic exposed to every idle passerby—a straw-and-ropiness everywhere."

Thank heavens it will all be over by the weekend.

READING:

The Diplomatic Corpse by Anne Marshall Zwack is a wonderfully light and frothy tale of love, revenge and diplomacy, and just what I needed after an exhausting day of packing boxes prior to moving house.

Maggie has spent 25 years being the perfect wife, dutifully following her upper-class husband, Jeremy, from one European city to another as he advanced up the diplomatic ladder. She has attended innumerable boring diplomatic dinners and receptions, hosted cocktail parties ad nauseum, chatted amiably with the wives of other diplomats, and has never put a foot wrong.

Jeremy is British Ambassador in Vienna when he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack. Hours after the funeral, when Maggie is still numb with shock, she finds out that he did not, as she had been told, die at his office desk in the Embassy but in the arms of his blonde Viennese mistress, Mausie.

Consumed with grief and rage, Maggie decides she will exact revenge on Mausie, and with the help of Zoltan, their lugubrious Hungarian chauffeur, she concocts a plan.

It is only after carrying it out that she discovers that Mausie was but the latest in a line of mistresses, Jeremy having had a liaison in each of the cities to which he had been posted ever since the start of their marriage.

Enveloped in fury, and feeling robbed of the life she thought she had lived, she embarks on a round Europe quest to wreak havoc on each of Jeremy’s other women.

The whole process of planning revenge takes every ounce of cunning that Maggie possesses. Aided and abetted by Zoltan and his whacky Italian girlfriend she careers round Paris, Budapest, and Rome plotting ever more hilarious ways of getting her own back.

Eventually she and her co-conspirators end up back in Jeremy’s London flat where they start a new business as matrimonial investigators. And it is through a case that comes to them that she realises that, in fact, Jeremy has had the last laugh.

Rated 4*

RANTING:

I wonder if the word “elitist” has the same meaning in American English as it does in English. Perhaps not.

Sir Evelyn de Rothschild is an immensely wealthy, incredibly well-connected British financier, born into the famously rich Rothschild banking family, He owns racehorses, is a patron of the arts and active supporter of various worthwhile charities. He is what would be described in Britain as one of ‘the great and the good’.

His third wife, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, is a well known American business woman who has made a fortune in her own right. A life-long Democrat who has raise huge amounts of money for the party, and close personal friend of Hillary Clinton- she and her husband spent their honeymoon at the White House – she divides her time between homes in New York, London and the English countryside.

Yesterday she announced, out of the blue, that she was ditching her long term allegiance to the Democrats and would now be backing Senator McCain in the forthcoming presidential election. This, she said, was because she felt that Barak Obama was too “elitist”.

Excuse me? A woman who is a fully paid up member of the business elite, who has married into one of the most elite families in England, who uses a title and has houses on both sides of the Atlantic, regards Barak Obama as elitist…

Hmm, pot calling kettle methinks.

RECIPE:

When you've been packing up boxes prior to moving, the last thing you want to do is think about what to give everyone for supper, so it was fortunate for me that the decision was made by what I found lying around after emptying kitchen cupboards. This is comfort food, easy to make**, and ideal for students to make at uni as it is cheap as chips. Kids love it because apart from being very tasty it looks mushed together in the way that mothers usually object to; "stop messing your food around and just eat normally" is the phrase I remember using long ago.

Anyway, it is perfect house-moving fodder and we all fell on it like starving vultures.

**The most difficult part of the recipe is opening the corned beef tins. In the interests of health and safety I should warn you to be very careful, I suspect more people get a nasty cut off a corned beef can than from anything else. Wrap your hand in a tea towel to hold the tin, or better still, abandon the stupid little opening key provided and use a normal tin opener to open the tin at both top and bottom so you can just push the beef out.

CORNED BEEF HASH – MY WAY

Serves 4

2 tins corned beef
2 onions, roughly chopped
4 – 6 potatoes, depending on size
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Worcestershire sauce
Tomato ketchup
1 tablespoon chopped parsley (not essential)
Salt & Pepper

Peel the potatoes and boil or microwave them until just cooked. Drain and cut into bite sized chunks.
Cut the corned beef into bite sized cubes.

Saute the onion in a large frying pan until soft and just beginning to colour, add the corned beef and continue cooking, use a kitchen fork to break down the beef.

Add a good slug of Worcestershire sauce, and about a tablespoon of tomato ketchup, then add the cooked potato and mix everything together.
Continue cooking, stirring so that as the underneath browns, it breaks up.
Mash down the potato pieces slightly as they cook.
Stir in the chopped parsley if you have any.
Test for taste and add more Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and salt and pepper if needed.

Serve piping hot with a fried egg on top if you are really hungry.

'HERE LIES JOHN BUNN, WHO WAS KILLED BY A GUN;

HIS NAME WAS NOT BUNN BUT WOOD,

BUT WOOD WOULD NOT RHYME WITH GUN

AND BUNN WOULD.'


British graveyards are full of fascinating, entertaining epitaphs - every month I shall put a new one up on the blog.

READING:

There were moments in my childhood where I felt so completely at odds with my parents that I was sure I must be adopted, and that somewhere in the world were two people who were my REAL parents and who would be charming, loving, and most of all, sympathetic and admiring of me. Of course this was not the case, I was the real child of my parents and merely suffering a typical bout of misunderstood youth. For the novelist A.M Homes whose memoir The Mistress’s Daughter I have just finished reading, such feelings were all too true. She WAS adopted as a newborn baby, and had always known the fact. She, like many other adoptees had always wondered about her biological parents, and had made some half-hearted attempts to trace them.

“In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the CFO, and the COO. Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything. She has made a fabulous life for her self, as ruler of the world, except for one missing link – me.”

However when, aged 31, her birth mother, Ellen, makes contact with her via the lawyer who had arranged the adoption, it comes as a complete surprise.
She discovers that Ellen was 22 when A.M. was born, and had been the mistress of Norman, an older married man, since she was 17 years old. Ellen has also contacted Norman to inform him she intends to trace their child, and so A.M. writes to both of them.

Almost immediately it becomes apparent that Ellen is a very difficult and needy woman. She never married, and has led a rather ramshackle life, both financially and emotionally. She considers herself sophisticated, but seems to be stuck in a time-warp of the early 60s. It is obvious that she has contacted A.M. because of her own needs rather than any desire to fill any needs of her daughter.

“Why won’t you see me?” she whines. “You’re torturing me. You take better care of your dog than you take of me.”
Am I supposed to be taking care of her? Is that what she’s come back for?
“You should adopt me – and take care of me”, she says.
“I can’t adopt you “, I say.

When A.M. first meets her birth father Norman in his lawyer’s office, the conversation is stilted and extremely odd.
“Tell me a little bit about you”, I say.
“I’m not circumcised. My grandmother was a strict Catholic, she had me baptised, I’m not circumcised”.

He also insists that they both undergo DNA testing to make sure she is his child, and when the results prove it to be the case he tells her that he will now introduce her to his family – he has four other children, all born before she was, and he is still married to his first wife. However, though he continues contact with A.M. for a while, he is reluctant to follow through with this promise, and eventually rejects her completely, even refusing to give her the DNA paperwork which proves his paternity.

Ellen dies unexpectedly a year or two after they have met, and A.M. is left even more painfully confused about who she is than she had been originally. Norman’s subsequent rejection, in effect abandoning her for a second time in her life, enrages her, and she embarks on a quest to discover everything she can about her ancestry.

Using all the tools of the electronic age she turns detective, following the tiniest clues and thanks to the wonders of the internet, and diligent fossiking in old archives, she builds up a picture of each of her parents and their antecedents, as well as the family history of her adopted parents who have remained solidly supportive whilst all this turmoil has been going on.
“The desire to know oneself and one’s history is not always equal to the pain the new information causes”.

Eventually she has a child of her own and at last becomes settled in a sense of self.
“I am my mother’s child and I am my mother’s child, I am my father’s child and I am my father’s child…
Did I choose to be found? No. Do I regret it? No. I couldn’t not know.”

Other people’s lives always seem more interesting than one’s own life, merely because their lives are unfamiliar. In this memoir A.M Homes has managed to distil what it is that people crave when they seek out their family backgrounds, a sense of belonging, a sense of place, and a sense of self. I found the book totally compelling.

Rated 5*

RANTING:

“Today I am going to kill something. Anything.

I have had enough of being ignored and today

I am going to play God. “

These are the opening lines of a poem entitled Education for Leisure* by Carol Ann Duffy, one of our most celebrated modern poets.

For the past 5 years, AQA one of the biggest exam boards in the UK, has included the poem together with others by the same poet, in an anthology of poetry used by students sitting English GCSE.

It is a challenging poem which gives much food for thought and I imagine it would generate some interesting comments during classroom discussions.

In all the years that the anthology has been included in AQA’s English syllabus, there have been three complaints about the poem. Two complaints about it both by the same person, referring to the narrator carrying a bread knife with the possible intention of hurting someone,

and one complaint about the line in the poem which refers to a goldfish being flushed down the loo.

Based on a back of the envelope calculation using GCSE numbers given on the OFQUAL website (Office of Qualifications & Examinations Register), I estimate somewhere in the region of ¾ million 16 year olds have written AQA’s GCSE English exam in the past 6 years

So – over several years and ¾ million students only THREE complaints. AQA say they have bowed to these complaints, given the current media publicity about knife crime, and have instructed schools to remove the poem and/or the anthology.

Why not do away with Romeo and Juliet? surely it is not an appropriate play for young people to study in Britain today; it features stabbings, gang warfare, the teenage protagonists are bunking out to have pre-marital sex and it climaxes with a double suicide. And as for The Merchant of Venice....

In fact, why doesn't AQA go the whole hog and just remove anything by W. Shakespeare from the curriculum, his plays are just far too violent and in the current climate of panic over knife crime it would be better that teenagers were not exposed to such influences.

Sorry if I seem snarky, but really AQA has been ridiculously weak - they should have had the guts to tell Pat Schofield - the complainant - that it is a POEM, not an instruction book. Removing that poem won’t stop knife crime – hells bells, the poem won’t have caused any knife crime in the first place.

What will they feel they should censor next ?

*Today I am going to kill something. Anything.

I have had enough of being ignored and today

I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,

a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.

We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in

another language and now the fly is in another language.

I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half

the chance. But today I am going to change the world.

Something's world. The cat avoids me. The cat

knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.

I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.

Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town

For signing on. They don't appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio

and tell the man he's talking to a superstar.

He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.

The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

RECIPE:

Way back in 1975 Shirley Conran wrote a bestselling book entitled 'Superwoman' in which she came up with the line "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom", and for many years I agreed with her. But then the delicious large open brown mushrooms known in the UK as Portobello mushrooms became widely available and I revised my ideas. These are wonderful as a side dish, as the vegetarian option on a braai/barbeque, or on their own as a light supper. The foul weather we have been enduring in Britain this summer has meant that these have had to be baked in the oven each time I've made them - too wet for braaing these past few weeks.

STUFFED MUSHROOMS

6 large flat mushrooms – Portobello or similar
3 spring onions, finely chopped
120 g white breadcrumbs
2 cloves garlic
1 heaped tablespoon finely chopped parsley
Salt & pepper
Olive oil

Optional extras:
A slice of cheese placed on top of each mushroom prior to baking.
A fried egg placed on top of each baked mushroom.

Pre-heat oven to 200°C

Remove the stalks from the mushrooms and chop finely.
Heat a little olive oil in a sauté pan and gently fry the spring onions and chopped mushroom stalks until onion is soft but not brown.
Put the breadcrumbs, chopped parsley, minced garlic, spring onions etc into a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Mix together, add a dash or two of olive oil if needed to make the stuffing slightly moist.
Divide the stuffing between the mushrooms and press it in carefully.
Drizzle a little more olive oil over each one.

Place the mushrooms on a baking sheet and place in the oven for 15-20 minutes until the mushroom is soft.

Alternatively, the mushrooms do well on a braai (use tongs to lift them), place round the sides of the grid when the braai is ready for cooking.

NOT QUITE TEARING MY HAIR OUT - BUT NEARLY...
Moving house in three weeks (second time in 12 months) hence blogging hiatus.



READING:

Of all the books I’ve read in the last few weeks, Away by Amy Bloom has been one that gripped my imagination right from the first page.

Lillian Leyb is a 22 year old Russian Jew who arrives in New York in 1924, having lost her husband and family in a bloody pogrom back in Russia during which her three year old daughter vanished. Like the many thousands of immigrants who entered the USA through Ellis Island she speaks no English, is penniless and her only contact is a distant cousin. She is utterly determined to build a new life, and will do whatever it takes to survive and prosper – after all, nothing can ever be as horrendous as what she has already endured.

She is fortunate enough to encounter Reuben Burstein and his son Meyer who take her under their wing. Reuben is the grand old man of Jewish theatre in New York and his son is a much admired actor, and Lillian becomes mistress to both men. Life is becoming comfortable but complicated.

Then one day her cousin Raisele (who Lillian thought had died back in Russia) turns up, and tells Lillian that her daughter Sophie is alive. According to Raisele, the child was rescued by another Jewish couple during the pogrom and they fled the village taking her with them. They told others that they were going to head east to Siberia.

Lillian is immediately consumed with the need to return to Russia to find her child, but how to get there? After consulting her friend Yaakov who draws up an itinerary for her, she will travel west to Seattle, and from there travel north to Alaska so that she can eventually cross the Bering Straits into Siberia. The Bursteins and others try to dissuade her and one asks:

“You already live without your little girl--why not go on living without her? Because she belongs to you? Is that why?”

“…Because she is a little, little girl,“ answers Lillian, “Not that she is mine. That I am hers.”

The rest of the book is the story of her odyssey and the trials and tribulations she endures in cities and the wilderness. Each chapter is a vignette of a section of the journey and introduces the extraordinary people she meets en route. Gumdrop the gorgeous black prostitute who rescues her from the gutter in Seattle, Chinky Chang the Chinese con artist who takes a shine to her when they meet as inmates of a women’s prison near Prince Rupert in British Columbia, and John Bishop the reclusive policeman who killed a man in a bar brawl and is lying low in the wilds of Alaska.

As Lillian moves on her way, the author fast forwards through the life of many of the characters she has met and the reader discovers what happens to them. Gumdrop, for instance, reinvents herself as a very proper school teacher and lives the rest of her life in bourgeois probity.

I would not dream of spoiling the book for other readers by revealing the outcome, but for me the ending was absolutely right.

In some ways this book is a linked series of short stories, so I was not surprised to find out that Amy Bloom has published a couple of books of stories already. Her writing is lyrical at times, sometimes humourous and sometimes tender, and in Lillian she has created a character who personifies how the human spirit can endure the most challenging situations.

It was not until after I read the book that I discovered that the inspiration behind it was the vague legend told in the Yukon of a young Jewish woman called Lillian Alling who “walked to Russia from New York” in the 1920s.

A wonderful life-affirming book, I really recommend it.

Rated 5*

RANTING:

I am so naïve. I thought I knew – more or less – what a charity is. There are two or three which I support because I think they do a wonderful job.
In Britain charities are highly regulated by the Charities Commission. This I presumed was to ensure that conmen/women were not setting up bogus schemes and fleecing the public.

However it was not until very recently that I learnt, from a Charities Commission survey, that two thirds of the biggest charities in this country get nearly 80% of their money from us as taxpayers rather than from donations by people who support the causes of the particular charity. These charities have more in common with quangos; the temptation for a charity receiving 80% of its income from government funding must be to fall in with government requirements for the spending of such funds, thus removing any real independence of action.

Working my way through the list of charities which get money from the government (ie: us, the taxpayers) I came across some which surprised me.

Among them was the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (aka RSPB) which gets £20 million each year. Twenty million pounds per annum to save the birds, this in a country that is denying cancer sufferers, on the grounds of cost, some of the drugs that could help them. Hmm….

Oh and another thing, one of the latest projects funded by the RSPB is to save the Jerdon’s courser, an endangered bird native to India. Don't get me wrong, I like birds and when back in Africa I have been known to spend hours birdwatching, although I could hardly call myself a fully-fledged twitcher. The project is very laudable I’m sure, but am I happy about my taxes going, without my knowledge to a charity I personally haven’t chosen to support who then use that money to save a bird in a country which has more millionaires and billionaires than we do in the UK. Well what do you think I feel? Someone should be telling people that this is where our taxes are going.

I’m telling you now.

RECIPE:

Last week I had a phone call from my DD saying that she and DDF had discovered a wonderful bramble hedge with a bumper crop of berries when out walking near their home in Cambridge. They planned to go back at the weekend and pick several kilos of fruit to make jam, and could I give them a recipe. As I hate the little seeds that stick in your teeth, I usually made Bramble Jelly, but it takes longer and requires more fiddling about with jelly bags or squares of muslin, so I gave them this jam recipe which I have made once or twice in the past. It is an easy recipe and very tasty on hot buttered toast!

BRAMBLE AND APPLE JAM

1kg brambles
350g apples (eating, cooking or windfalls)
Water
White granulated sugar. (Make sure you have at least 1½ kilos available.)

Core and roughly chop apple (skin on)

Put apples, cores and brambles into a large heavy bottomed pan, add just enough water to barely cover the fruit, simmer gently until the fruit is soft.

Push the softened fruit and juices through a sieve and weigh the pulp.

For every 450g pulp allow 450g sugar.

Put the pulp and sugar into the pan and heat very gently, stirring, until all the sugar has dissolved.

Bring to the boil and boil rapidly without stirring for 8-10 minutes until the jam reaches setting point.

Once setting point has been reached, allow jam to cool for a minute or two before ladling into warm sterilised jars. Top with wax jam covers whilst hot before sealing jars with lids.

Label and store in a dark, dry place.

JIAŌ BĪNG BÌ BAÌ Chinese proverb.

The arrogant army will certainly loose the battle = pride comes before a fall.

READING:

The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris is a fascinating book, not for the murder mystery which is the backbone of the plot, but for the glimpse it gives the reader of life in modern Saudi Arabia.

Nouf ash-Shrawi is a beautiful young woman from a wealthy, well-connected Saudi family living in Jeddah; shortly before her arranged marriage is to take place she goes missing, and the family are frantic. Her brother Othman Shrawi calls in a family friend, Nayir Sharqi, to investigate her disappearance. Nayir, a pious young man, earns his living as a guide taking rich Arabs and foreign visitors to spend time in the desert. Working on limited information he starts searching for her, but within a day or so her body is found in a desert wadi.

Othman asks Nayir to find out how she died, so he goes to the coroners’ morgue in Jeddah to ask for details of their findings. He gets past the guards at the morgue who are there to stop the fanatical Muslims from gaining access:

“Slicing and prodding a dead human body was forbidden by law, and while the government quietly sanctioned autopsies, there would always be vigilantes hunting for un-Muslim behaviour.”

At the morgue he meets up with a woman called Katya Hijazi, who is engaged to marry Othman. Katya is unusual for a Saudi woman as she has a professional job, working in the coroner’s department as a forensic scientist. She tells him that although Nouf apparently drowned, she was pregnant, and so she thinks someone murdered her. The two of them join forces and the subsequent investigation makes Nayir start to question his faith, his friends and the culture of a country which keeps women segregated and gives men such a attitude to them.
Eventually Nayir and Katya solve the mystery of Nouf’s death, but the process has changed them both.

Some of the aspects of life in Saudi Arabia seemed extraordinary. Nayir is always worried about being caught alone with Katya, as they would be immediately be charged with adultery – a woman is never allowed to be alone with a man who is not married to her or a member of her immediate family; for this reason he, like many young Saudi men, carries a fake Misyar
(Certificate of Marriage), which can be hurriedly filled in if the religious police appear.

Women are not permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia, so many of them have drivers/minders employed by their families to take them wherever they have to go. Women’s faces must never be seen by non-family members, and strictly speaking they should also cover their hands and ankles as if seen these could drive a man to lust. When answering a telephone in the women’s section of the Shrawi household, the matriarch waggles her hand in front of the receiver to disguise her voice, in case it’s beauty drive a male caller to impious thoughts.
The restrictions on women make every simple thing warped and difficult for them. At one point Katya is bought an ice-cream cone, but then has a problem getting to a place where she is permitted to lift her burqua in order to eat it before it melts in the intense heat.

The oppressive heat is very much a feature of the book, and as

“Saudi had no bars, no night-clubs, no discos or cinemas. There were underground hang-outs of course, in the homes of the elite….There were even brothels, private residences where men could find prostitutes – all non-Muslim women, since it was haram to sleep with a Muslim whore.”

bored Saudi men spend their evenings driving round and round the streets in their cars, which are at least air-conditioned; needless to say this results in massive traffic congestion in the cities.

There are some really bizarre moments; Nayir has to go with Othman to a clothes souk one evening as Othman wishes to buy a coat for Katya’s trousseau. Whilst at the crowded bazaar, full of rich men buying furs for wives who will never be able to wear them, Nayir turns to see a female flasher – a woman who stares directly at him and then, for a split second lifts her burqua to reveal her naked body.

Zoe Ferraris is an American who married a Saudi Arabian and went to live with his ultra conservative family in Jeddah, so I assume that much of the detail of Saudi life depicted in the book is taken from her experiences there.

The book was an entertaining read, but at the end I put it down with a feeling of profound thankfulness that I do not live in such a society

Rated 4*


RANTING:

I doubt if anyone could have missed noticing that the Beijing Olympics began today, and I am absolutely furious about the HUGE sums of money that have been spent on sending publicly funded workers to the games this year.

Nearly 600 people in all, including local councillors, government ministers, policemen, civil servants etc - for example Gordon Brown has taken 20 staff with him at a cost of £114,000 (why? we already have a fully staffed embassy in Beijing). The reason being trotted out is 'fact-finding' prior to the London Olympics in 2012. The London Development Agency - an internal Greater London Authority quango set up by Ken Livingston have hired one of Beijing's premier clubs for their exclusive use during the game at a cost of £2.5 million plus. This is all stuff and nonsense, most of these people won't be finding any facts, and anyway, if Labour is voted out of office at the next election (which many political pundits seem to think very likely) none of these official, government ministers etc will play any part in the London Olympics. Lets be real, for most of these people it is a jolly at the taxpayers' expense.

However, I reserve my real fury for the BBC who have spent £3 million on taking 437 staff to Beijing, that is 124 people more than the 313 UK athletes taking part in the games. If as a result the viewers and listeners were getting some incredibly special coverage it might, it just might, warrant the expenditure, but we just going to have the usual gang of suspects commentating on the sport, and a few other BBC apparatchiks droning on as usual about the 3 Ts (Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan) and considering themselves very liberal and committed to freedom of expression. Despite all this expenditure, this morning's 'Today' programme on BBC Radio 4 (for those who don't live in Britain, this is THE daily current affairs programme, and all opinion makers listen to it or are on it) had the most spectacular piece of nonsense about why the games were commencing at 8pm on 8th August. They wheeled in some lady numerologist who wittered on about the number 8 representing the word China in numerological terms, she hadn't got an f***ing clue why the Chinese Olympic Committee had chosen that date and time. As any fule no, the number 8 is considered very, very lucky in China, and has been for millenia. This is because the word for 8 in Mandarin is bā, which sounds very like the word for wealth/prosperity/good fortune which is fā. Also, 8 has a perfect symmetrical shape both horizontally and vertically which indicates that it is in balance. So to start the games at 8.08pm on 08/08/08 is very propitious for China, the Chinese, and Beijing. So the Beeb has spent all that money, sent all those staff out to Beijing and they couldn't even get a simple thing like the number 8 right - what hope is there for any other information they feed us being accurate?


RECIPE:


In the last month or two I've been slipping into the bad habit of buying ready-made salad dressings. It is such a waste of money, as it only takes a few minutes to make a dressing there is really no excuse for buying them, I've just been lazy and seduced by the huge variety of dressings that you find on supermarket shelves. Having admitted the error of my ways, I am now determined to make my own again, starting with Thousand Island dressing which I always loved as a child. Because of it's name, I'd always assumed that the dressing was inspired by a group of tropical islands, but when I googled it I discovered that there is an archipelago of islands which straddle the US/Canada border in the St Lawrence River at the north east corner of Lake Ontario. Sometime in the early 1900s the recipe was passed from Sophie Lalonde, who had a hotel nearby, to a famous actress whose summer home was in the Thousand Islands, and it was she who named the dressing.

THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING

75ml mayonnaise
75ml crème fraiche (or sour cream)
60ml tomato ketchup
Juice of one lemon (approx 60 ml)
Dash of Worcestershire Sauce
4 Tablespoons finely chopped green pepper
2 Tablespoons finely chopped red onion
1 Tablespoon chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 Tablespoon sunflower oil (or similar)
Good pinch cayenne pepper
Good pinch salt

Combine all ingredients in a bowl and whisk together or give a short whiz with a hand-held blender until all is well combined. Not too long if you use a blender as you don’t want the pepper and onion totally amalgamated.

Pour into a bottle or jar and chill in the fridge. Remove 5 minutes before using.

Will keep for 2 weeks in the fridge in an air-tight container.

"I KNOW THE HUMAN BEING AND FISH CAN COEXIST PEACEFULLY"
George W. Bush (had anyone suggested that they couldn't?)



READING:

Last week I celebrated my birthday (no, I am not going to tell you which one, but it wasn’t a decade or particularly significant, but it is in double figures) and I was given some wonderful books as birthday gifts.

Among these was The Bolter by Frances Osborne, which is a biography of her great-grandmother Lady Idina Sackville.

Idina Sackville was born in 1893 to very rich aristocratic parents. Whilst still a child her father, the 8^th Earl De La Ware (after whose family the city of Delaware in the USA is named) ran off with a can-can dancer (or two) and his independently wealthy wife took the extraordinary step of divorcing him. In Victorian society divorces were rare and very much disapproved of. This in part seems to have started the pattern for Idina’s own life, as she married and divorced no less than five times, and had innumerable lovers, before during and after her marriages. She scandalised 1920’s society, was estranged from her three children, and was the inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character ‘the Bolter’ in ‘The Pursuit of Love’.

It is hard to comprehend just how laissez-faire upper-class sexual morals were, provided one was married, as the pictures we see of the men and women of the time are very starchy and proper. But Idina’s behaviour went way beyond the accepted norm, and at the end of the First World War, when her first husband Euan Wallace (the author’s grandfather) divorced her; she set off with husband number two – leaving her two small sons behind -

to make a new life farming in British East Africa, soon to be re-named Kenya. Of course, she didn’t really make a ‘new’ life, but continued as before, having affairs with other men, and after only two or three years, getting divorced again and returning to England. There she met the 21 year old Josslyn Hay, grandson of the Earl of Erroll, and despite the difference in their ages – she was nine years his senior – married him and swept off to Kenya once more. There they bought a farm and built a house, and both of them began to have affairs with all and sundry. Here she had her third child, a daughter, about whose parentage there were many rumours. This marriage also ended in divorce, and yet again Idina returned to England where she met and married husband number four, a very wealthy American, to whom, despite resuming her usual behaviour with other men, she managed to remain married to for eight years – a record for Idina!

Idina was the lynchpin of the so called ‘Happy Valley’ set whose bed-hopping, wife-swapping behaviour in Kenya gave rise to the joke doing the rounds in upper-crust English society “Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?”. Happy Valley came to international prominence in 1941 when Idina’s third ex-husband and father of her daughter, Jossyln Earl of Erroll, was found shot dead in his car and the husband of his current mistress, Sir Jock Delves Broughton was tried for the murder. The whole scandal, and the lives of the Happy Valley set were documented in the book ‘White Mischief’ by James Fox, which was later turned into a box-office success starring Greta Sciacci. In fact Idina was portrayed in several films, the most notable being when Greta Garbo played the character based on her in ‘A Woman of Affairs’.

Selfish, sexually voracious and dissolute, Idina comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant woman, even though she must have had a great deal of charisma. Far from being committed to a life in Africa, she treated it as her personal playground, and other people and her own children as toys which could be dispensed with when she didn’t want them any more. She appeared to lack any concept of loyalty or duty.

Latterly she tried to establish contact with her by now adult children, but this was only partially successful. Indeed the author’s own mother – Idina’s granddaughter – deliberately blanked her out of the family history until a newspaper article made it necessary for her to tell her own children who Idina was.

As a slice of social history and as the portrait of completely amoral woman, The Bolter makes eye-popping reading.

Rated 4*

RANTING:

There is a new craze slowly beginning here in the UK (and in Germany too) if the press is to be believed, it is the Cuddle Party. These are events which have a ‘facilitator’, which you pay to attend (£30 is the going rate in London I’m informed), and which is:

“A structured, safe workshop on boundaries, communication, intimacy and affection. A drug and alcohol-free way to meet fascinating people in a relaxing environment. A laboratory where you can experiment with what makes you feel safe and feel good.”

Yep, you pay money to meet a bunch of strangers and cuddle them. Bletch!!! What a weird, creepy idea.

This ‘concept’ was dreamed up by two Californians – need I say more?

Not that I think all Californians are doolally, I’m just saying that some Californian practices seem rather off-the-wall to non-Californians.

If any of my family and friends read this, and feel that they are in need of a cuddle, come right on over and I’ll give you one for free – with a glass of wine or a Gin & Tonic thrown in as a bonus.

RECIPE:
Cherries are one of my top ten favourite fruits, but most of the cherries sold in the UK come from Turkey, France or the USA, and though they are delicious it is a great shame because England used to have some of the best cherry orchards in the world. There is a move to try and get more English cherries into the supermarkets and greengrocers, and if you want to save the wonderful varieties of English cherry click on CherryAid. As last Saturday was National Cherry Day, I decided to do my bit by buying some English cherries and making a cake.

CHERRY UPSIDE DOWN CAKE

Serves 6-8

500g cherries (stoned)
150g soft brown sugar
75g butter
3 large eggs, lightly beaten together
150g self-raising flour
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Pre-heat oven to 180°C

Butter and flour a 20cm cake tin, and line the base with baking parchment.
Arrange the cherries over the bottom of the tin, and sprinkle 50g of the sugar over them.
Beat the butter and remaining sugar together until pale and fluffy then add some of the egg, beating it in well before adding some of the flour and more egg and continue beating. Add the remaining flour and egg alternately beating each addition in well before adding the next; add the vanilla essence with the last addition of egg.
Pour the cake mixture over the cherries and sugar, and smooth it level with a spatula if necessary.
Bake in oven for 25-30 minutes until risen and golden and just beginning to come away from the sides of the tin. It may not need quite as long if it is in a fan oven.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a couple of minutes.
Place a large serving plate over the tin, and carefully invert it.

Serve warm or at room temperature with crème fraiche or with whipped cream.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MADIBA!
Nelson Mandela is 90 years old today.



READING:

When I read on the Orange Prize short list that The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg was set in Rhodesia in the late 1970s, I knew I had to read it. Books set in central Africa are few and far between, and as I spent all my early childhood there I try to read anything and everything that is published.

The book is narrated by Nyree O’Callohan who is almost nine years old; she lives on a farm in the Vumba Mountains (to the east of Rhodesia, near the Moçambique border) which has been in her family for three generations. The Rhodesian ‘Bush War’ is on-going and Nyree’s father comes and goes as he is is mostly away with the ‘Troopies’ (Rhodesian armed forces) fighting the ‘Terrs’.

Nyree, her six year old sister Cia, her mother and her paternal grandfather, Oupa, remain on the farm together with the farm workers, domestic servants and all their families. The whole farm is surrounded, as most Rhodesian farms were in those days, by high security fences to protect them from the ‘Terrs’, and the fence is the boundary of the girls’ world.

In term time, they attend a small local school for children from all the farms in the area, but during the holidays they can roam freely all over the farm, hunting for fairies, observing Sangoma rituals, watching Chongololos curling up when poked with a stick, feeding ants to ant-lions, putting chameleons on to brightly coloured rugs to see if they will turn scarlet or orange, and generally enjoying all the pleasures of a bush childhood.

One day Ronin, the 14 year old illegitimate son of a great-uncle arrives to live with them, and their lives slowly begin to change. Ronin is a nasty bit of work, the two girls dislike him and are wary of him, and with good reason as he is sneaky and spiteful hiding and breaking their toys whilst sucking up to their mother and Oupa. Oupa is a difficult old man, constantly bemoaning the fact that his son only has daughters to inherit the farm, he is an unreconstructed racist of the worst sort; never-the-less, he sees through Ronin and his wily ways and acts as a buffer between him and the girls until his age and dwindling mental abilities make him a problem himself.

Slowly the Bush War comes to an end as does the family’s time on the farm, and with a dark twist to their lives, and violent birth pangs, Zimbabwe is born.

It is not a happy tale, but it does accurately convey the time and place. The descriptions of the flora and fauna of Rhodesia are beautifully written, and reading the book there were moments when I was really emotional remembering my own childhood in the bush. Liebenberg uses very authentic language and has her characters use the terms ‘munt’, ‘Afs’, ‘kaffirs’ etc just as some white Rhodesians would have done at the time - which could offend some readers, however I thought it added to the very real way she creates the atmosphere of those times. The book also made me think long and hard about what ALL the people of Zimbabwe have lost in the past 25 years, and that too made me feel like weeping.

Rated 5*

RANTING:

Whilst parking my car the other day I noticed a 'rough-sleeper' lying on cardboard with some clothing rolled up under his head as a pillow. Next to him was a tiny pile of his belongings. He had chosen to sleep (mid-afternoon on a hot sunny day) at the top of a flight of four or five steps leading to the padlocked entrance doors of a disused office block. On the pavement next to me as I parked were two teenage girls in school uniform (I think I know which school they attend), both neatly dressed and chatting away non-stop as teenage girls are wont to do. Suddenly, to my amazement, one of the girls broke off the conversation and tiptoed up the steps to the rough sleeper, picked up his packet of cigarettes, and tiptoed back down to join her friend. I leant through my car window and yelled at them whereupon they scarpered. Little b*tches.
It all happened so quickly that I couldn't get out of the car fast enough to chase them.
What kind of person steals from a down-and-out? Those girls had mobile phones and were sporting smart shoes, why would they even consider stealing from someone who had so little? Not of course that they should steal from anyone, rich or poor, but this really was the lowest of the low. What word describes girls like that?
It ages me to say this, but I can't imagine it happening when I was young.




RECIPE:

If you have to provide food for a picnic, this recipe, given to me years ago by my sister, is absolutely ideal. It slices into wedges that can be held in the hand, no need for cutlery, and tastes wonderful with salads if the sun is shining, or with a mug of hot soup if it is cold and wet. Perfect padkos. You can play around with the herbs you use, and with the number of spring onions; the only thing to watch is that you don't over bake it, as it can dry out somewhat. I made it recently for a picnic lunch with my DD's soon-to-be in-laws; lying on the grass by the River Cam, accompanied by a glass of chilled Chablis, it went down a treat.

LELO’S COLD CHICKEN PIE

1 quantity shortcrust pastry made with 350g flour/125g shortening

1kg raw chicken meat – I use a mixture of breast and thigh
500g good quality sausage meat
1 teaspoon mace
6 spring onions
Rind and juice of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
1 tablespoon fresh sage – chopped small
2 tablespoons cream
Salt & Pepper

Beaten egg to glaze

Pre-heat oven to 200°C

Line a 9in pie dish with half the pastry.

Cut the chicken meat into strips and sprinkle with the mace and salt and pepper – set aside.

In a food processor whiz together the sausagemeat, herbs, spring onions, lemon rind, half the lemon juice and the cream.

Fill the pie with a layer of the sausage mix, then a layer of chicken, layer of sausage mix etc alternating and ending with a layer of the sausage mix. Sprinkle each chicken layer with some of the remaining lemon juice. Dome up well.

Cover with the remaining pastry, seal and crimp the edges of the pie, cut a hole in the centre of the lid, and glaze with beaten egg.

Bake at 200°C for 30 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 170°C and bake for a further 1 - 1¼ hours until golden brown.

Allow to go completely cold before cutting and serving.