A Good Friday

Here are the particulars: a hot cross bun from the Good Friday breakfast gathering that our lovely neighbour gives every year. You will never find anything like these buns in a shop, or anywhere. Only she can make them like this and only her tiny and beautiful kitchen can expand to hold such a convivial gathering as we always have at this time. The candle in a pot of wheatgrass is an Easter gift from her, and the beeswax candel in front of it another gift from a neighbour across the road. The twigs in the strange and suggestive vase (made by my mother-in-law who was a fine potter) come from the cherry tree that was recently cut down. A small yellow chicklet is perching on the rim, it came with the beeswax candle, an early hatching.

Later on, I made Matapa. Well that is what my friend, the Cake Lady (who is not the same person as the Bun Woman) calls it, and I ate it at her house first. But it is a recipe that seems to change every time it is handed on, it is quite accommodating, always delicious and takes hardly any time to make. Spinach, tomatoes, onions, garlic, chilli, garam masala, coconut milk, peanut butter. You have it with rice. Afterwards Son went back to revision and his parents went over the road to an impromptu wine-tasting event set up by neighbours and their kids who are home from college. There were about ten bottles opened and the only one I liked was an Australian Merlot (Burra Brook, 2007). There was an expensive one that smelled of cat's piss. Not that I drank very much more than a sip of anything. Mr. Signs got a bit plastered.

More strange and suggestive mother-in-law vases (one has nobs on, the other indents, and they fit together when pushed close), both filled with daffodils from our garden. We had them in the kitchen for a while but the daffodils came with rather a lot of black creepy crawlies so we took them out. They have gone now, but the daffodils and vases look fine where they are on the patio, welcoming in the spring. And I think of the words that I saw pinned up on the walls of my daughter's school one spring when she was five years old:

For I, the Lent Lily, the Daffy-down-dilly,

Have heard through the country the call to arouse.

Happy Easter, Peeps.


(you can enlarge the first photo but not the other two, don't know why, and it seems to have baffled greater techie minds than mine)