In Defence of Carbs

My name is Kit and I love carbs. There I’ve said it... I’m not doing the paleo thing, I send my kids to school with sandwiches made of bread and cheese, and I love baking. And it may be crazy to feel you have to defend a love for what has always been a staple part of our diet, but there are so many articles out there now demonising the simple slice of bread that it is time for me to speak out!

Let me just say that I eat meat, vegetables and dairy too. I stuck with butter throughout the many years that Flora reigned supreme. I use cream in my cooking and sometimes buy whole fat milk as well as low fat, so I don’t only love carbs, my devotion is shared between all the major food groups.

The ‘paleo’ diet sounds great for those who can afford to buy good quality meat and dairy products in decent quantities; and for those who really do have medical reasons to go low carb, such as diabetes. I’ve heard from several friends, whose opinions I respect, that going paleo has really made a difference to them. But why does a food trend have to swing so violently one way or the other. Suddenly all the information I’m bombarded with says carbs are bad, carbs are poison. Can’t we have some sensible middle ground here?

For most of us (and I mean those without medical problems, intolerances and allergies) a balanced diet is one that includes all the food groups. Carbohydrates give us energy, they are filling and satisfying, they are feel good foods. Yes it’s better to go for complex carbohydrates, like brown rice, wholewheat flour, oats and so on, but even white bread is fine in moderation. Moderation being the operative word here; a diet disproportionately heavy on carbohydrate isn’t going to be good for anyone.

 Moderation, middle ground, middle of the road sounds so dull... it’s not as interesting, dramatic or colourful as being at one of the extremes, but I really believe that when it comes to food it makes sense. Too much or too little of anything can be bad for you. All those claims for thirty years that low fat diets were the answer for a healthy heart now seem to be being refuted. I’m vindicated in my championing of butter. Who knows what research will find out about carbs in thirty years? That they actually are essential after all?

I want my children to enjoy food, to eat sensibly and not get stuck on the latest food fad. I’d like them to be able to travel the world when they’re older and eat with their local hosts without having to cross reference the menu against a long list of foods that they don’t eat.  I’d love it if they ate more vegetables. I’d love to be able to afford ethically raised meat to feed them several times every week. But as long as they are eating a fairly broad spectrum of home-cooked foods, I think that they are getting adequate nutrition.

If we are going to have any food issues in the house, I’d rather banish processed foods and focus on home-cooked. But even that I can’t take to extremes; I still feed our son on baked beans, which he loves, and eat bought peanut butter with marmalade myself as a lunchtime snack.

I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that it is modern methods of preserving and farming foods that is at the bottom of the mainstream reaction against certain foods; that it is the preservatives and traces of agricultural chemicals in flour that may be a factor in many cases of gluten intolerance; that it is hormones and chemicals in intensely farmed meat that may result in meat or animal fat causing health problems.

So my idea of a culinary utopia would be us all sitting down together and dining off a laden table of organic fruits and vegetables, cheeses and cream, organic pasture-reared meat and breads made from organic stoneground flour, without counting a single calorie, and living healthily ever after... with a generous serving of organic fair trade chocolate to finish off with.

But until that day dawns I will just do the best I can with the freshest and most ethical foods I can source and afford on a variable budget. I will bake bread, crunchies, cakes and pastries without feeling guilty about it, and I will happily cook for paleo friends, vegetarian friends, vegan friends and gluten intolerant friends (although perhaps secretly hoping that they are not all present at the same meal!)

How about you... are you finding that paleo is right for you? Or are you an unrepentant carboholic like me!

Winter School Run

Car keys jingle, dogs bark excitedly, scenting a car to serenade. It’s still dark outside but a rim of light over the eastern mountains promises dawn. Heavy school bag is slung into car, headlights switched on, reversing out into grey half light. The sky holds the only colour to be seen, the land undressed in dull shades waiting to be woken. Hares switchback from restio clumps startled by the headlights, cunningly escaping as we turn down towards the gate. No talking, it’s too early, son reads book by the light of his phone.

Bumping along the long dirt road, eyes are constantly drawn left to the horizon: purple line of mountains etched against a lightening sky, like an amateur watercolour painting, but one that could never be captured, the panorama too long, thin and never-ending to be pinned on paper.

Wisps of mist float suspended at head height as we reach the tar road, swallowing colour even more, till all is headlights and wipers, fan blowing air on the windscreen to disperse the blur of moisture that grabs at the car.

School children rub hands together at the side of the road keeping warm, clustered in huddles until the school bus comes. Early morning traffic isn’t heavy here: some unhurried holding back others rushing, whisking past in an impatient flurry.

Dropping son to catch his onward lift, the sky is brighter now, horses are breakfasting on straw and hay, sleep-silent children lugging too-heavy bags into the car, son still reading, leaning against garage wall.

I retrace my path, long straight road bordered by blue gums, watching the achingly slow transformation of dawn into sunrise, as a tinge of pink warms the blank sky. Then mist wraps grey fingers, shutting out the sky entirely, creating a silver grey world with the gum trees its furthest walls. Down into the dip the wall of fog thickens, a tunnel broken only by lights of cars driving just too fast for safety.

Then back up our dirt road where fog dwindles to a fairy mist, the outline of the hill behind us floating delicately above and a rosy gold sky hovering over all. Now a bright spot on the horizon shows where the sun has chosen to rise today and, turning onto our farm, the hill has already lost its silver hue, instead washed the pinkish green of an old colour photo in the family album, its colour skewed by age.

Then a blinding flash reflected in the house windows shows that the sun has at last crested the mountains, bringing colour to the world, banishing the grey mist and promising a day fine enough to dry a load of washing. 

Kids will have arrived at school by now – will they see the sunrise or be already shut away in classrooms under yellow electric light?

A lyrical sunrise is an everyday happening in a South African winter, only remarkable to me because I don’t usually do the morning school run, so the wonder is still fresh. My sunrises are usually seen from our stoep, in between clearing breakfast and vacuuming, emails and a cup of tea. It’s nice to be out in the midst of one, noticing the progress one mile at a time without household chores cluttering the brain.

Valentine's Day Memories

When I was at school, Valentine’s Day was when you yearned to get anonymous cards in the post from secret admirers. In reality, if you were lucky, you got an anonymous card with a fabricated postmark sent as a spoof by one of your friends. Unless you had the kind of mum who sent you a Valentine’s card just to make you look good in front of your friends... this was boarding school after all, with post given out by the form teacher before school started for the day.... the anticipation, the suspense, the let down if your name wasn't called, those tell-tale red envelopes the envy of the unlucky no-post-today girls.

At university Valentine’s Day continued to be a non-event. Forget about secret admirers – if you were lucky enough to have a boyfriend when the fatal day came round, you discovered he wasn’t the romantic sort, or else got it completely wrong with pink carnations from the petrol station, instead of the single red rose he gave to the other girl in the student house we shared – true...how dare he! That one didn’t last more than a few weeks more!

When I finally met my husband, it turned out he wasn’t much of a fan of conventional and artificial celebrations of romance either; but he made up for it in hugs and ‘I love you' s all year round, so Valentines’ day swiftly passed out of my range of vision as a major event. We invented a fun little tradition of drawing red hearts on each others hand for the day and left it at that.

Except now our girls are picking up on Valentines’ Day as a special day – Middle Daughter in particular who loves any kind of occasion. She spent yesterday making cards for all the family and her best friends, made heart biscuits with each person’s initial iced in pink. She made sure to wear red and white to school – seems to be the South African way of celebrating Valentine’s Day at school and at work. Both girls joined in with our red hearts on hands again, though our son declined the offer. They get to wear civvies at his school today, but I don’t think a 13 year old's credibility stretches to red hearts drawn on hands!

So I feel a bit of a humbug when it comes to my Red Velvet Heart collection of gorgeous hearts... I spend all year looking for my favourite heart products; Valentine’s Day is the big day for people to give heart gifts and here I am neither giving or receiving a heart myself except in DIY form... still I reckon that hearts are for all year round, not just for February 14th, so I'm not too distressed about it! Middle Daughter's heart biscuits were delicious by the way, as well as beautiful and made with love.

What about you? Are you a big fan of Valentine's or does the day go by unnoticed?

Death and Life

My mother-in-law on her 88th birthday two years ago

Death is just a part of the cycle of life. But it’s a part that we hide from, push away, avoid like an unfortunate, socially inept relative. In books the baddies die, but never the main characters, at least hardly ever. If they did there wouldn’t be a follow on, we wouldn’t buy the book in the first place. So it’s hard when death becomes part of everyday life for a while.

At the moment my mother-in-law is slowly dying. She’s 89, has been getting frailer for years, but we think this is the final stage. She’s at her home on our farm with a nurse and two of my sisters-in-law taking care of her. My husband and I take turns sitting with her when she’s calm, but can’t really help with the nursing. Our kids are just going on with their usual routine of school and play, even though there is an atmosphere of limbo and holding of breath in our lives.

We wish she could go quickly and have a release from the distress and discomfort that she’s experiencing, but dying happens in its own time; strength of spirit fights frailty of body and the letting go process is hard.

My kids asked questions about death when they were younger. They know our beliefs. But this is the first time it has been so close to them. When my father died it was a distant thing, cut and dried news from the other side of the world. They attended his memorial service but I flew over alone for the funeral. Now they are on the fringe of a gradual, drawn-out dying.

Co-incidentally the story book I’ve been reading to them over the last couple of months Roller Skates (Newbery Library, Puffin) is one of those old-fashioned children’s stories that isn’t afraid to confront death in one of the good characters. We reached one of the later chapters where a little 4 year old girl, befriended by the heroine loses a battle with pneumonia and the doctor she brings to her arrives too late to save her. I’d forgotten about this and it came right in the middle of this week of nursing their old grandmother. We started talking about the old days – this is set in New York in the late nineteenth century, before antibiotics and when poverty meant that young children often did die of diseases that can be cured easily today.

At one point Middle Daughter said she didn’t want to talk about death any more, so we stopped. It made me wonder if we should be talking to them more about what is happening around them, or let them insulate themselves with their regular lives and let it flow over their heads. It’s all part of life and growing up, so I don’t believe we should protect them too much by not telling them anything, but I don’t want to force them to confront more than they can deal with emotionally. I’m a great believer in answering questions when they come up, at whatever age and letting things unfold in their own time, so hopefully we’ll hit the right balance.

Anyway I’m glad it turned out that we were reading Roller Skates just at this time, and have lingered over it longer than usual what with the distraction  of holiday time, and forgetting the book when we went away to the river for our holiday. It turned out to be entirely the right thing to be reading, giving enough room for discussion and putting feelings into words and images.

Looking at the reviews on Amazon, most of the adults had fond memories of it being read to them as children and re-read it regularly, while the kids who reviewed it universally found it boring. So definitely better to read aloud to your kids – mine all enjoyed it.

I don't know how many more days my mother-in-law has left but I hope she finds the right time and slips away peacefully. I hope my children learn and grow from the experience of death happening within the family, rather than removed and sanitized by distance. It is all part of life after all.

25th Jan Edited to add: Juju died peacefully in the night with three of her six children around her. She was compos mentis and full of humour to the end. Go well Juju on your next adventure, with all our love.

Kitchens of My Childhood

Corey at Tongue in Cheek wrote about her Mum’s kitchen, still the same kitchen of her childhood, full of baking and constant comings and goings of family. She sent me back to recollecting the kitchens of my childhood.

The front of the school where I grew up - not me in the picture!

I say kitchens, because there were two. The small galley kitchen in our flat and the big bustling school kitchen below. I grew up in a school, a small, English boys’ boarding school. The buildings were an old manor house in warm honey stone built for the local squire and his family in the late Victorian era. Spacious and roomy but not too imposing. Our flat was the upper floor in the servants’ wing forming an L to the main house. Our kitchen was small, the end of the wing partitioned off, high counters put in by the first headmaster and his wife, who were both tall, big windows just a bit too high, but light and airy looking over the stable yard.

There wasn’t much counter space for spreading out on, but my mother had a trolley that we used as an extra surface when baking biscuits or cakes and it is there that I remember waiting to scrape out the cake mixture, hovering, one foot in the green carpeted corridor, as she scraped as much into the cake tin as she could, us willing her to stop before it was all gone. It was there I learned to make drop scones, proudly serving up a plateful to a party of visitors one tea-time (was it the school governors?).

Every corner was used, cunning turntables on the corner shelf just inside the sliding door held all the little pots of baking powder and such like, another turntable on the wide window ledge held jams and honeys, bottles of orange squash and Ribena lined the counter, cereal boxes lived high on top of the wall cupboard, with the sliding glass door that one of us broke trying to climb and reach something. Tupperware lived in the cupboard underneath the trolley that needed just the right pressure to open. A blue padded top stool with a retractable step sat next to the trolley to reach the high shelves over the cooker. The four of us could just fit in to do the washing up if we stepped around each other carefully.

The big school kitchen immediately below my bedroom was another domain. Three big Agas in an imposing row kept it warm year round. A huge table stood in the middle, big built-in wooden dressers on two sides. In the days before stainless steel regulations took over, it was little changed from the old manor house kitchen, with painted wood cupboards and linoleum floor. In term time it was a hive of activity presided over by the cook and housekeeper.

I would sidle in with a  bowl on a mission from my mother to fetch flour, dried fruit or eggs from the store room. A big old fashioned scales with weights sat on the dresser. Three big metal dustbins held the flour (self-raising and plain) and the sugar. A metal dipper sat on top of each, to scoop out from the white powdery mountain inside, and I’d carefully weigh out however much I needed, adjusting the metal weights in pounds and ounces, for whatever recipe my mother or I was baking up in the flat, before scuttling back upstairs to our little kitchen.

The dried fruit required more exciting fetching. The first drawer in the dresser held a heavy bunch of housekeeper’s keys. Above the drawer hung a clipboard with the school menus for the week pencilled in. I would check it out regularly, my heart quailing if it showed fish for lunch on Friday, or relieved if a favourite pudding was planned. All the larders were kept locked, but I had the entree and could help myself to the keys and go and fetch whatever was needed.

The dim housekeeper’s larder held shelves stacked with dry goods and tins, and smelled of spice and raisins, in my memory at least. Whatever I was fetching I would be tempted to open the dry fruit cupboard and lift the lid of the tin containing mixed dried fruit (the cake mix with candied peel) and grab an illicit handful... There were three other interlinking larders with wire mesh screened windows and stone slab counters, dating back from the days before refrigeration and between them all the food for the school was stored. Apart from that there was the potato shed in the back yard, dark and slightly damp where the potatoes were stored in a heap still covered with earth. Milk was delivered daily, as the fridge for the whole school in those days was only the size of an average large family fridge today.

In term time I slipped in and out of that kitchen shyly and surreptitiously, politely greeting and then escaping back up to the quiet upstairs, occasionally lingering if it looked like there might be enticing tastes offered. But in the Christmas holidays the school kitchen became ours. My aunt’s family, and great uncle and great aunt, joined us and we would cook meals for the extended family downstairs, expanding into the school as if it were once again a family home and manor house. Then we would stand around the big table, my aunt, mother cousin and I, icing the Christmas cake, mixing up brandy butter with frequent tastes, peeling potatoes, preparing big meals.

The tall cupboard that contained food colouring and baking supplies was at our disposal for making peppermint creams with all the fancy cookie cutters. The Agas always kept the kitchen warm and toasty, unlike the chilly winter corridors of the school in holiday time, with central heating turned right down. By now I knew that the wooden sloping lidded box on the window salt contained salt not sugar – my toddler brother and I had discovered that, tricked by laughing kitchen staff, who were then less than thrilled when we spat our mouthfuls out over the clean kitchen sink!

We’d use the rattling metal school trolleys to wheel the food up the stone flagged passageway to the smaller dining room, or to take tea things, always a proper afternoon tea with bread and butter, cake and biscuits, through to the wood panelled main hall which we transformed into a sitting room, grouping all the sofas and chairs around the huge fireplace, the school Christmas tree adapted for our own use.

After Christmas with the new school term, we shrank back into our little upstairs kitchen again.

Those tastes of a big warm kitchen with a central table stayed with me. My dream kitchen was formed by the descriptions in Rosemunde Pilcher novels of a kitchen stretching the width of a London basement, welcoming friends and family to sit around and chat, sofa at one end, room to stretch out and bask in the warmth of baking and cooking. And that is what I now have here.

A kitchen that stretches into sitting room, a big table where everyone can sit around, scents of baking bread and biscuits. And I almost never cook fish on Fridays!

What do you remember about your childhood kitchen?

Feet

Feet are fundamental to our well-being and yet we only notice them when they stop doing their job properly.

I’ve been taking my feet for granted all my life, always knowing I can walk anywhere I want to, reserving the right to learn to dance one of these days when I get around to it, expecting them to hold me uncomplainingly when I stand cooking in the kitchen for hours when we have a festival, demanding their services day in day out.

It’s only now that one of them is complaining that I’ve stopped to think how much I rely on them. One of my lateral arches gave me trouble a few years ago. The physio gave me exercises. I stopped buying cheapo shoes and bought my shoes from Green and Cross from then on. I waved farewell to even the occasional wearing of heels and stopped imagining that one day I’d wear those black suede stilettos from my twenties again. (I still haven't thrown those stilettos away, but keep them for the sake of nostalgia and let the girls trip around in them occasionally)

My foot gradually improved and I forgot about the problem again; took my feet for granted once more, even though I now only bought them the best supportive footwear. Occasional reminders kept me on the straight and narrow; back on a visit to England, I found I couldn’t wear wellies to walk the dog and had to buy proper walking boots, and walking barefoot on hard surfaces was no longer the best idea, but my feet worked again.

And now the same one is twingeing again. Suddenly walking the dogs around the farm seems too much to ask , so I’m missing out on the latest family routine of all of us walking round the circle road before supper. I don’t want to go belly dancing tonight in case I make the twinge worse. When we went out for lunch on the weekend we couldn’t just park and casually saunter around the streets window shopping before lunch as I was worrying how long my feet would last out. I can feel that I’m walking oddly, putting my foot down too carefully and probably tensing somewhere else in my leg or back to compensate.

Having something wrong with a foot makes you question your abilities. It underlines all the things that you can’t do easily, if you’re not physically healthy. I feel tentative about everything I do. Whereas I usually leap up to get something or do something a million times a day, now it is suddenly an effort. This little physical insecurity extends into feeling unsure about everything.

And this is something little, a painful twinge in the arch but no more than that. I can't imagine how it would be if it were a serious injury or one that was unfixable. So I’m off to the physio tomorrow and maybe a reflexologist. I want somebody to fix it so that I can have the luxury of taking my feet for granted again; so that I can have a blithe confidence in being able to walk up a mountain, go dancing or just wander anywhere anytime without thinking about it. I want my foundation solid again.

Autumn Flowers

Flowers in soft-focus and now I know why – my whole world has been in soft focus for a while now and the optician has told me I need to start wearing glasses all the time, not just when my arms aren’t long enough. The silver lining is that maybe I’ll be able to see the details sharply once again: that sparkle in the children’s eyes, the sheen on a rose petal, the texture in a stone. The colours will look brighter through the right lenses... and my husband assures me that the frames I've chosen are sexy!


Flowers on our table all week long – a bouquet of golden roses that over a few days opened fully from bud to scented full-blown flower: a gift from Charlotte when she brought her children to lunch here and our blogs finally met in person. Thanks Charlotte for the gorgeous flowers – they have inspired both of us to a frenzy of flower photography and have smelt wonderful all week!


Flowers in waiting: my sister-in-law ordered a load of bulbs this year and surprised me with a present of some bags of daffodil and snowdrop bulbs, remembering my nostalgia for those English spring flowers. I spent this afternoon planting them, tucking them carefully into flower beds among other plants that I hope will shelter them and encourage them to flower. There’s something very therapeutic on a damp autumn day in planting bulbs for spring – you leapfrog over winter and are envisaging bright blooms and fresh sunshine, even as the days are closing in and the evening chill sends you hurrying indoors at sunset.


Flower therapy: despite my stiff back (because once outside you can’t just plant a few bulbs, and end up pruning back lavender and rose geranium until a couple of hours have fragrantly passed and you find that you can no longer stand up straight…) despite the aching muscles, I feel revived by the time spent outside with growing things. I can still smell the rose geranium on my skin and in my hair and there is a buzz of energy and a lightness that wasn’t there yesterday after a day lolling inside over a book.

The threads of a day

At breakfast my mind wandered away from the cereal packets: the day seemed to me like a loom with a variegated pattern growing into a chaotic and bright cloth. A background of deep green grass with white bobbles of ducks preening. Bright threads of children’s voices in azure and pink making a continuous stream of chatter, zigzagging and flowing through the duller muted greys and blues of a soft autumn morning of mist. Soft, warm brown, in fluffy patches denoting purring cat on lap.

We talked of flotation tanks, fantasising about a tucked away place to escape the noise of the dogs that drives my husband demented at night with their restlessness. A flotation tank would be a smooth silk in a uniform charcoal, soothing to the senses, but dull and monotonous after a while.

Driving into town, to fetch newspapers and ingredients for tomorrow's lunch, the fabric was rough cotton with a graphic print of bold blocks of red and yellow on a tarmac-grey background.

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A sense of something profound but elusive teased at me all day – it had something to do with this passage from the Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander:

Taran (a boy on the threshold of manhood, eager to prove himself, says of another would-be young warrior, who is proud and ill-tempered):
‘I think he’ll feel better once we find the cauldron. There will be glory enough for all to share”
Adaon (older and more experienced) smiled gravely. ‘Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty too.

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These posts grabbed me today too: Mary Alice on raising your children to be people you’ll like and this post by Jennifer Howze on skewed perceptions of happiness.

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Today felt like a gentle lesson on living in the now – a lesson that sometimes I think I have mastered, then I generally slip backwards and niggle at myself and the universe, impatient to make progress, tread new ground, achieve things, when sometimes I’m just supposed to be taking stock, looking at the individual threads and appreciating them, no more no less.

So instead of grasping after the elusive profundity, I played chess with our son, both of us beginners, he a quicker learner than me. And this post instead of being coherent and deeply insightful is imperfect and scattered, but with a hint of the colours of my day.

Computers Then and Now

Dick Francis is another one of our authors to turn to for a good escapist read. I've just been re-reading 'Twice Shy', which was first published in 1981. Some of his books don't date that much, the world of horse-racing carrying on pretty much as it always has, but this one has at its centre a betting system on computer tapes. It had me glued in reminiscent wonder, as it mentioned the computer they were to be played on - a Grantley Basic with a 32K hard drive, the Basic language taking up 12K in memory so you were left with 20K to work with. Each character, space or comma that you typed would take up one of those 20,000 slots of memory, so all your programs were on cassettes to be loaded only when needed.

In 1981 I was in my O'level year. The year below me was the first group to be taught on the one computer that the school had just acquired. They learned how to write a basic program and play Space Invaders, by repetitively pressing the space bar to shoot and the arrow keys to manoeuvre. Computers seemed then to be on the periphery of life, I played Space Invaders once or twice myself and went on my way.

Five years later computers had advanced enough to be more useful. At university there was a computer room in our faculty building, where we could sign up for a 'Word Processing' course. Some of the more forward-looking did and were able to present essays and theses beautifully typed. I carried on with my fountain pen, tormenting my professors with essays written in turquoise ink.

I slightly regretted not taking advantage of the computer room when I graduated and tried to earn my living from temping. I started as the lowest of the low: doing data entry - names and addresses punched into the membership list of a big company, whereas if I had mastered Word Processing I could have earned double… but anyway eight months later I drove off to Italy in a Mercedes minibus with the world of computers just an inconvenient blip, no longer necessary to master.

I eventually did get to grips with them. By 1995 PCs were affordable and essential to any business and I started doing our accounts on them and typing letters. They had evolved into glorified typewriters and calculators - e-mail was becoming a normal way of communication. My new husband learned about the innards and started dropping motherboards, megs, gigs and ram into the conversation. Computers had edged into our lives and were now indispensable.

Dick Francis' novel has a second section 14 years on, where the computer betting system again rears its ugly head. He would have boggled back in 1981 if he had seen the extent of the shift in computer usage that would actually have taken place by then. His vision encompassed a few boffins with banks of gleaming equipment in air conditioned rooms, complicated programs still in basic that had to be comprehended to make any use of a computer, cassettes still loading programs onto computers and telexes the height of communication technology.

What would he have said to the internet - in fact what would we have said back then if somebody had told us that we would be sitting at computers for fun, blogging late at night? That Microsoft had made sure that we didn't need to learn Basic to be able to use the computer, that most of our communication would be dependent on a temperamental machine deigning to be cooperative and that international boundaries would shrink to nothing in the face of a virtual world.

So now here I sit in my dressing gown with two screens in front of me, so that I can read something on the internet on one and type on the other, behind me my husband's two monitors, both connected so that we can send each other things, though we mostly Skype them to each other, and I write insignificant musings on retro computer culture shock to share with blog friends on the other side of the world. Who would have thought it back in 1981?

On Italian Food and Seasons

I've been writing a series of articles about Italian food recently. I used to work in Italy and for years I was steeped in the local specialities of the different regions I travelled to. I haven't been back though, since my son was born.

After a wedding we went to today at a wine farm restaurant, where the food was fashionably stacked in towers, encircled by drizzles of intense sauces with fanciful ingredients, I thought back to meals I've eaten in Italy.

How can I be so sure that what I'm writing about Italian food is still current ten years later? Why do I know that I could walk into any one of the restaurants I used to eat in with my clients and eat the same wonderful meal, as long as the season was the same? Why is it that good Italian restaurants don't feel the need to reinvent their dishes with the latest jus or garnish to entice their regulars back once more?

I think the main thing that separates gourmet Italian food, or any traditional European food, from the fads and trends of haute foodiedom, is the seasons. Italian food (or rather each different regional cuisine, for each small area of Italy has its own traditions), is closely linked to the seasons. Italian gourmets will drive for hours to taste the first wild mushrooms of the season in a small mountain trattoria, or to feast on the first truffles. They will happily travel many kilometres to the best fish restaurant on the coast - one owned by the cousin of their neighbour, who can be guaranteed to produce the freshest fish in all Italy.

When your palate is refreshed every month by a new seasonal speciality, you never do tire of those delicacies. Chefs don't have to tempt jaded plates with ever more outlandish combinations. You can stuff yourself every day for a month with asparagus in every possible variation from risotto to pasta, as antipasto or in a sformato, but then it will be out of season, you move on to artichokes and by the time asparagus season comes round again you will welcome it enthusiastically anew.

It's not just that Italians are conservative in their tastes, they are that, but they know a good thing when they have it on their plates and see no reason to mess with it. Good ingredients are cooked simply so that their flavours are enhanced. Plus within in Italy there are so many variations in the cuisines of the different regions that, if you travel around, you can eat the same dish cooked in a thousand slightly differing ways.

So the ephemeral trendy restaurants may have moved on in the last ten years from 2D pictorial arrangements on enormous plates to intricate towering stacks of food that need several lines on the menu to identify the ingredients, but I am as certain as certain can be that I could walk into a favourite restaurant in Le Marche tomorrow and eat the same fantastic pasta dish scattered with a myriad of tiny wild mushrooms collected by the father of the restaurant owner that morning. He may be ten years older but the mushrooms will be from the same secret collecting places at the edge of the woods. In spring it will be the wild asparagus that make a wonderful delicately flavoured risotto.

The seasons provide the variety and rhythm that keep our fickle human palates from satiation, presenting us with treat after treat through the year, all we need to do is tune back into them and accept their gifts, something that the Italians have never forgotten.

Balance

I've been stuggling to balance my life recently. My clear three hours work slot in the mornings, isn't really enough, when I get a client with a big proofreading and editing job and a deadline of yesterday.

My blog has been an abandoned space recently, with a crazy week last week of trying to get ahead with my work blog, prepare the house for my parents' arrival on the Thursday, think ahead to Youngest's birthday the next day and make enough time to spend with them all.

Charlotte's post came to mind, when the very evening of their arrival, I got an urgent e-mail from a potential client with an e-book that needed editing …preferably yesterday. I put aside Saturday to do it in, relying on my parents to keep the children entertained and vice versa.

Friday was the birthday - sacrosanct, devoted to presents and baking cheese biscuits for the party, picking strawberries for the birthday cake and oops! thinking up a treasure hunt. Middle daughter's birthday had been a triumph of inspiration and planning, at least in retrospect. Youngest's was a case of last minute winging it.

We had to go and sign some papers in our local town, just before the party and, all the way in and back, I was mulling over stories for the treasure hunt, working out possible clues, hoping for inspiration - it duly arrived, enough at least to keep a five year old happy, and I ran about like a mad thing on my return, fifteen minutes before the guests were due to arrive, to put the clues round and hide the treasure.

On Saturday with my dedicated in-house baby sitting service, I managed to spend seven clear hours at the computer and finished the editing and proofreading of the e-book, setting aside Monday morning for any revisions. Sunday I kept myself away from the dreaded machine, except to decorate my poor sad blog with some strawberries to cheer it up.

Monday was when my precarious balance toppled. The e-book had come to me in multiple files and now needed formatting, plus there were some more separate files to edit. I was enjoying the project, (a really useful book on breastfeeding) and liked the clients, so wanted to do my best for them.

But computer time is completely intellectual, your physical body gets no recognition. By the end of the day, when I had taken just a lunch break and a tea break, (after having forgotten about picking the kids up from school and having to phone up to say I'd be late), I was chilled to the bone. All my energy had been focussed and directed into my computer. I was irritable and snapping, muttering savagely under my breath, when an email wouldn't send, a veritable prima donna at her first performance!

I'd done the work, but had had to abandon all the other parts of my daily routine, the physical things, the nurturing things, the emotional and spiritual things. It amazed me how physically wiped out I was, it was like I'd had a fever - my head ached, my digestion had shut down! I went to bed with a hot water bottle and my winter pyjamas.

So now I need to find ways of balancing crazy deadlines with home life and being realistic about how much work I can do in a day. The trouble is I enjoy the work, I was feeding on the buzz of getting it done and creating a pleasing, integrated book from a jumble of differently formatted files.

Anyway today, I enjoyed sauntering over to my sister-in-laws house to do the laundry, looked at the flowers, tasted some ripe mulberries from her tree, edited some copy for another client, set some bread dough to rise, wrote a bit, sat with youngest as she had her snack ..that is balanced. Hopefully I'm learning to pace myself. Any tips on keeping your sanity and your family intact under pressure of deadlines are gladly welcomed!

P.S. I think under the circumstances I'll give NaBloPoMo a miss this year, no need to add more deadline pressure to my fledgling professional balance!

A Cluttered Mind

Two things resonated with me from this post of Charlotte's. The first that she finds it hard to ask for help and expects herself to be able to go it alone and the second the eternal housework dilemma. How, if you're not very good at housework yourself, to train your kids at least to have some idea of keeping the house moderately liveable in?

The asking for help thing is also a big hurdle for me. I always assume that everyone else has enough on their plate already and that the least I can do is sort out my relatively-unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things troubles without bothering them. So a retreat into a non-communicative comfort zone with general anaesthesia of a nice, undemanding book until I feel better, is my usual response to stress. The current interruption of blog posting, probably reflects my current struggle with the transition from cosy cocoon of stay at home mother, where I'm comfortable and confident in my abilities to bake bread, sew funny things out of felt and kiss things better, to the economic demand that I find my feet again in the strange and scary working world. I'm trying to straddle the two by working from home but it's a slow process building up a freelance business from scratch and it needs a lot of self-confidence to go out there and market yourself. I'm trying to be philosophical and read it as the universe using economic necessity as a kick up the b*m, to make me shift out of a comfort zone and stretch previously unsuspected muscles. Sometimes the philosophy slips though and chocolate and a Katie Fforde are the best recourse.

I love Katie Fforde not least because her blurb claims that her hobbies are ironing and housework but unfortunately she is too busy keeping up with the sitcoms to indulge in them. Her heroines are usually balm to the reluctant housewife, cheerfully untidy and chaotic, which makes me think that she is like that too - we're best friends already.

The divide between the untidy and the very tidy isn't quite so polemical in the blog world as, say, the hectic daycare debate that springs up and ruffles feathers at regular intervals, but there does seem to be quite a bit of sympathetic bonding between fellow messy mavericks, with bewildered incomprehension of the opposite camp.

The joys of house work haven't yet claimed me. I'm one of the clan proud to proclaim that a messy house is a sign of creativity and yet there is always a slightly defensive note to the fanfare. However much I know that I feel more comfortable when the house is looking a bit rumpled, hate it when the book I'm reading gets tidied away and can only find a jumper if it's just where I left it, I still feel that I should be tidier and teach my children to be too. This usually results in a rush of ineffectual clearing up, getting irritated with the kids when my handiwork gets rendered nul and void by another layer of played with detritus, then a surrender to the force majeure of chaos, until the next time my Virgo sun sign asserts itself.

One of Charlotte's commenters suggested a helpful site for the housework-challenged. I visited and perused its pages thinking that maybe I could do some of this, until I read the section of basics which included detailed instructions on how to achieve a shiny sink, involving soaking it in bleach, rinsing it extremely well and ever after drying it tenderly with a cloth after every use...aaaaagh! If I ever invested that much effort in a shiny sink I would be held hostage to it, standing guard over it day and night to ensure that everyone who came near gave it the same TLC. Gone would be the days when the kids could wash their sand-encrusted hands/toys/plates in it and get away with a minor request to use a bucket next time. My fleeting interest in gaining brownie points and becoming a better housewife was abruptly curtailed as I realised the devastating effect it could have on family life. Another of Charlotte's commenters remembered her mother's passion for keeping a clean house and how the children always used go next door to play. I jumped firmly back on to the messy = friendly house bench.

I've settled for decluttering as a means to improve the surface visibility in our house. Decluttering seems to be the Feng Shui of the moment. Getting rid of the excess stuff that is why your house is so untidy in the first place, and trying to change the mentality that makes you hang on to things that you don't use any more, makes more sense to me than spending hours cleaning, only to have it look exactly the same minutes after three kids and four dogs explode into the house. At least decluttering seems to last for a few days.

A mouse visitor in the larder inspired me to try the method. Our larder was getting harder to get into as the pile of stuff at the far end was making a bid to take over the entrance. The counter was overflowing with half used packets of this and that and boxes of empty jam jars filled the storage space. A few hours spent being ruthless on the weekend and I have a gleamingly clear counter space, can see the floor and there is even room for the cats to get in and catch that darned mouse...unfortunately the hall is now cluttered with the excess boxes of jam jars, which I still intend to keep for jam-making in strawberry season, and more boxes destined for the garage with all the recycling..!

Now whenever I need a morale boost I can go and stand at the door to the larder and admire its orderliness, and as long as I keep my back to the hall my halo glows brightly.

When I was 25

This was started as a writing prompt and is a powerful memory stirrer. I read Charlotte's post, which set me off reminiscing, finding some similarities and many differences in our experiences. Then even though I've already posted once today, I had to follow through, write and post before the memories faded and my 25 year old self disappeared back into the mists of time.

When I was 25, I turned my back on the full-time office job, with the travel company I was working for, and returned to the itinerant nature of tour managing, travelling with the clients on their walking holidays in Italy. I'd done one season and then accepted the office job at the end of it, which I'd coped with reasonably well over the winter months. When spring came and the other Tour Staff flew off to sunnier climes and Italian food, I chafed under the demands of office life and decided that I wasn't cut out for it after all. The decision was a huge relief and as I turned 25 I headed back to Italy to breathe the aromas of Tuscan cooking once more.

When I was 25, I had the confidence to meet a group of unknown clients at the airport and drive them off in to the countryside, with the enjoyment of their holiday entrusted into my hands. I always had pre-trip nerves, like stage fright, especially being a shy person, but I did it over and over again. I'm glad I was that person then as it gives me a memory of that ability to cope and trust in myself, to refer to now if ever I doubt my abilities.

When I was 25, I thought nothing of driving from Pisa to Oxford in 24 hours on my own in a Landrover, driving through the night on the French autoroute, sustained by Pocket Coffees (chocolates with a whole espresso concentrated into its liquid centre) with a cargo of Italian cheeses and a whole ham, unsure whether this was a legitimate import or not but driving through the Nothing to Declare at Dover anyway.

When I was 25, I had my first (and only, fingers crossed) car crash, when a new driver swerved across the road into me, writing off my beautiful butter-coloured Peugeot 205, breaking a bone in my foot and my nose and wrecking beyond redemption a beautiful soft scarf in the autumn colours of the Tuscan hills, that I'd bought in Italy. It left me with my foot in plaster for a month, back home revisiting the comfort of child-like dependance, with my mother in attendance, and appreciating the convenience of fully comp. insurance.

When I was 25, I thought I'd better catch up with my friends on the property ladder and bought a flat with a friend in London. That is where I'd been off to at the time of the car crash. Due to being immobilised for the whole month of February, I left all the house-hunting to my friend and, as time was running out before the season would be sending me off to Italy again, I found myself, without much thought on my part, a North Londoner in Willesden Green, when by inclination I subsequently discovered myself to be a South Londoner - and there is a cultural difference that goes with the divide of the Thames! I indulged myself by buying my first ever bed, double of course, even though there was no-one to put in the other side, with a wonderful pocket-sprung mattress, which has survived to this day, but is now our spare bed. The flat ended up being merely a base to return to after my stints in Italy, a winter perching place, and I got to know all the routes to South London very well!

25 was a time of being young, free and single, when my earnings could be spent on myself, and although they weren't huge, I could afford to trawl the London markets and sales for frivolous items of furniture, ridiculous clothes and bric a brac. In between intense periods of work I had cavernous spaces of free time to spend at the Everyman Cinema watching old Italian movies, explore London and read.

When I was 25, I was still five years from getting married and three years away from finding the right man, so there was an empty space, or rather, a sense of circling looking for the direction I was supposed to be heading in, I was marking time, knowing that I wanted to marry and have children one day, but not knowing what to do in the meantime, apart from experience life as it presented itself. Maybe I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more if I could have looked forward five years, but that tension of uncertainity is all part of life's rich tapestry!

Alternative Reality

Last week just as I was in the middle of baking a batch of fairy cakes for yet another class cake sale, two eager helpers at the buttons of the Magimix (yes I cheat, but this method is condoned, nay recommended, by the divine Nigella) the phone inevitably rang and catapulted me into a frenzy of activity that resulted in rather well tanned fairy cakes.

The company that I used to work for before I had children, taking people on holidays in Italy, had tracked me down through my mother. They had a new trip about to start here in South Africa, their Tour Leader who was already out here preparing for the trip had had to fly home as her father was dying, and could I help.

So it was that I found myself, after a flurry of phone calls, driving to the airport in my scruffy car to meet the local guide, who was now taking the leader’s place, and welcome the group, trying to access the remnants of my once ultra efficient Tour Manager personality and quell the pre-trip butterflies in my stomach. They’re like stage fright and I always used to suffer from them, even when I was seamlessly running trips all summer. Meeting a new group of people... that important first impression, what will they be like?

It all did go smoothly. We drove to the stunning hotel – Cape Dutch wine estate with a backdrop of mountains and had a wonderful lunch, a grown-up lunch with conversation and wine, that I hadn’t cooked myself, in beautiful surroundings. After lunch I went with my new colleague, who is staying with the group, to her room to go over our plans. Relaxed on pristine bedspread in a tidy room with no clutter, a sparkling bathroom, giving on to a private terrace, on a lawn beyond which a helicopter reposed. Imagined staying with the group, going from nice hotel to nicer hotel, eating in good restaurants, sampling different wines, returning to my pre-children days of two parallel realities.

Then I waved goodbye, got back in my scruffy car and drove out of the bubble which faded to unreality as I neared home and popped completely as I walked into our weekend messy house, where my son was groaning on a sofa, having had an allergic reaction to a bee sting, supper needed cooking as we expected a guest and I felt at home.

Then it came upon me that working for a holiday company, a good one at least, is all about creating bubbles – beautiful, bright, seamless bubbles, for your clients to dwell in, buffered from the demands of life and decision making. A little bit of human magic. You just have to make sure you don’t get dazzled by your own spell-making and spend too long inside the bubble yourself, for real life is outside the bubble in the imperfections and gritty bits, in the silver linings of unlooked for clouds, wax crayons crunching underfoot and senile dogs barking, but also children smiling, presenting you with obscure presents constructed of glue and paper, people who belong to you for life, not just until the bubble bursts at the airport’s end.

I’ll be spending some time from home helping keep the bubble intact, then have another couple of forays into the world of gourmet restaurants and five star hotels to make sure everyone is happy, but I’ll be sleeping at home and that's how I like it.

Peace

Charlotte wrote a post about War recently, following on from a discussion that is going on about supporting the troops while being against the war itself. My initial reaction was as Charlotte says of herself to do an ostrich impression, avoid thinking about it and live my life, but then all these poorly expressed thoughts kept popping up in my head and I knew I would have to write something. The first thing that came to mind was Mother Theresa’s famous quote :

I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.
Mother Teresa

She was wise beyond measure in that simple assertion. Try for yourself. Think about the word War, observe your body’s reactions. Do you feel a tightening of fists, clenching of teeth, anxiety, an element of fear starting to tie up your stomach? Now try the word Peace. Your body relaxes, facial muscles soften, a feeling of warmth pervades you. Imagine lots of people experiencing those feelings, waves of energy rippling from them into the world, spreading their feelings and attracting back a like energy and you can understand why she insisted on the words pro-peace.

So I find that I don't want to write about the war, I would rather philosophise about peace, read what people have said about peace and keep the harsh W word away from my blog and family. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't support the troops - they are all people doing their best according to their beliefs and deserve our moral and practical support. I do think though, that when there is nothing practical we can do about it, all we can do is try to meditate, pray or just use positive visualisation to focus on peace. If we could all do that and send out that positive energy to spread over the world, maybe, just maybe it could start to make things better.

Here is a site with loads of interesting peace quotes, where I found a couple more that resonate with me:

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but on the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody, that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow, we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race, which no one can win, to a positive contest to harness humanity's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a peace race. If we have a will - and determination - to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

Maybe if every one in the US emailed this one to the White House, they would take notice!

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Upside Down

Bouleverse, in a whirl, head over heels, is my state of mind at the moment. My previous posts telling of changes in my life seem pedestrian compared with the broad brush of change that swept us up yesterday.

News just reached us of huge development proposals for our area. We live on the lower skirts of a hill with views of the mountains, a rural area of farms and lots of smallholdings like ours. It is a commutable distance to Cape Town but far enough out to be country. Over the last seven years on our property we’ve established the infrastructure of road, water and electricity, we’ve built our houses, planted trees, cleared alien vegetation and created a beautiful place to live and bring up our children. With two of my husband’s sisters, his brother in law and his mother we have made a wonderful family community.

Now developers are buying up land around us at inflated prices, as some proposed rezoning seems about to allow us to turn into a ‘garden city’ suburb of Cape Town. There doesn’t seem to have been any public announcement of this so it came completely out of the blue. Now we have to decide: do we stay and find ourselves surrounded by an enormous construction zone fof close packed starter homes, for several years, even though our property presumably would increase in value dramatically once it had settled down again, or see if they are paying out enough to make it worthwhile for us to buy land elsewhere and go through the whole building a home process from scratch. There is also the dreaded word expropriation being bandied around, to frighten everyone into playing their game.

I love our house, our view, the special place here where we hold our festivals. When I was learning about numerology, the numbers showed change. Then I couldn’t envisage it, still now I can’t imagine anywhere as nice as this. As I drive the kids to school along a straight country road past a line of hills and small farms, the thought of it all becoming a concrete suburb appals. In a water-scarce country where will they get that from for all those new homes.

I just have to find faith from somewhere, that we will make the right decision for our future, if our destiny lies elsewhere please let us find another home as lovely as this one – if only I could take our straw-bale house with us! Please send a prayer or some positive energy our way.

Addicted to Numbers

Substance abuse, apart from chocolate, has never been attractive to me, maybe luck, maybe genetic, but I made it through my teens and twenties with only the barest of whiffs of other people’s joints in passive smoking passing. No so with meaningless number games.

My son was given a Sudoku board game for Christmas. We must be truly in a backwater because this was the first time I’d come across it, though apparently it is all the rage the world over. The challenge of arranging little squares of card numbered 1 to 9 into coherent and unrepeated sequences has grabbed me, tied me up and rendered me impervious to general conversation, behindhand with cooking supper, neglectful of bedtimes....must be an addiction.

The last time this fatal tendency had me by the short and curlies it was Minesweeper on the computer that was my undoing. Through my first pregnancy I spent disproportionate amounts of time clearing minefields by rapid fire assessmemnt of the numbers, constantly trying to improve my speed, without getting blown up by the slip of a mouse click. Who knows what the attraction is, but even now when my eight year old is beginning to explore the treacherous ground of computer games, I have to be careful not to get too involved with demonstrating the ways of Minesweeper...he probably absorbed all he needed to know in the womb anyway!

Luckily there are only 100 possible puzzles in the Sudoku box to work through, so there is a finite amount of time I can dispose of honing my numbers skills. The Minesweeper section of my computer I leave to my son now, the fatal buzz of clear space exploding out to a rim of numbers all his. I’m trying to put my numbers to use, harnessing them to learn numerology, which is a demanding combination of number ability and intuition, but for relaxation and down time, organising numbers into patterns for no reason whatsoever has got me hooked.

Today

Today was the sort of day where you plan what you're going to do and then ditch the plan and go off in the other direction. I'd worked out what I needed to do: make cheese biscuits for the kindergarten end of term festival, they are an essential element by now; put together the drawings that the children had done, to make a book as a farewell gift to their teacher; sort strawberries; make Christmas cake, I started soaking the fruit days ago intending to make it last weekend; maybe with the leftover time catch up on some writing or accounts.

Instead I ended up working on the end of year newsletter for my son's school. A marathon of cutting, pasting, selecting artwork to photograph and then load onto the computer, finding photos from earlier in the year then putting it all together in some sort of order. My husband has kindly undertaken to get it ready in a more computer literate way to go to the printers tomorrow.

This left me at 6pm with all the more essential things to do from my first list plus cooking the supper and of course writing my blog, as there is no way I'm going to fail on the eve of the end of NaBloPoMo having made it thus far! So apologies for the unadorned account of my day making up most of the material.

The only deeply philosophical thought that popped into my head today - "Trust in the process" - it may feel like you're walking blindly through a bank of fog with no idea where you're going, but just the process of putting one foot in front of the other is getting you somewhere that you are meant to be going.

So with that rather incoherent philosophobabble, I'll leave you to collapse on the sofa!

A Word

I like the word valiant. It evokes images of knights in slightly dented, well-used armour vanquishing dragons against overwhelming odds to rescue those eternal damsels in distress. Courage, brave endeavour and determination.

The word popped into my head this morning as we set off on the school run and I noticed the hopeful shoots sprouting from the base of a wild plum sapling that didn’t make it through last summer. The dead wood above ground belied the vital force still coursing in its roots. A good winter’s rain nourished it and this spring it is trying again, growing from nothing, confident that we will water it properly this summer and not let it down. Valiant.

Skirt Dilemma

I love wearing skirts and dresses in summer, I do, but what about pockets? I am the proud possessor of two new cotton floaty summer skirts, comfortable, cool and pretty. But as I changed into one, out of my trousers after an incident with the sprinkler, I wondered where on earth I was going to put all the essential detritus from my pockets. Several coins, a tissue, two crystals, one of which is supposed to protect against the ravages of cellphone waves, a purple plastic ring and the car keys were all now homeless.

Now a floaty cotton skirt doesn’t want to be bothered with pockets and loaded down with all that rubbish, it is above such mundane issues. The vest T-shirt that goes with it has no space for junk either and wearing a bum-bag with such an ensemble just ruins the effect. My sister-in-law is famous among the children for carrying her lip balm tucked into her bra, but having the kids fishing down my front for something essential doesn’t appeal to me either.

So the question is to everyone out there, what do you do with all the trouser pocket contents, when you're wearing a skirt? Are you organised enough to carry your handbag everywhere you go and never weigh yourself down with all that in the first place? Or do you go round all summer, like me, without a tissue on hand?