It's all about the ♥

I have got a Waitrose special Valentine's meal deal for two for twenty quid.  If you want to know what's on the menu (and why wouldn't you?) it is: a starter of smoked salmon and lemon pate, main course of Gressingham duck (red cabbage + mangetouts), dessert of chocolate and passionfruit assiette.  Plus a box of Belgian chocolates and a bottle of Rioja.  Candles, incense and music I got, plus partner. We have been together for over thirty years, and twenty eight years ago, having stated very clearly at the outset that he would never want to marry, he proposed to me.  Never mind that it took more than eight years for us to get round to doing it, and by then our two children were born and old enough to come to the wedding dressed in elephant suits.  The gesture counts. 

Romantic love - the heightened kind that has the power to transform your world.  It isn't just about me and him.  It isn't just about you and whoever you are with, wish you were with, desire, yearn for, think about in secret, blast with curses and tears, celebrate in sweetness and flowers.  In every good friend I have had since childhood there has been an element of romantic love.  The freckled red-head who built dens in the bracken made something happen to my heart (I could feel it filling up) when she called me her best friend, and again when she later chose someone else instead of me.  The friend who moved schools to be with me, and whose trust I betrayed.  The ones who matter, and not just the friends and lovers.  The niece who stares at you as though seeing you for the first time and says she loves your face. The small sister with a fever who waits up late for you to come home from boarding school. The children.  On bonfire night, a few days after my daughter's birth, I felt every firework in the sky (seen from a hospital window) was incandescent with the fact of her existence.  When my newborn son first looked at me I understood afresh what it meant to know someone - the shock of recognition.  And what about the brief encounters, the connections that are good for nothing but the particular moment, which might be in a train, a conference hall or a post office queue?  Times when you catch a person whole, or they catch you, though nothing comes of it that you can name, but something is changed - the heart is stretched, made bigger.  Perhaps not romantic love, but almost. 
And the animals, can I mention them?  Not just my own cat who loves, in her fashion, and though it is to some extent about the food, it is more than this (I meet her at the point of need and she restores my soul); once you really love an animal, you learn how to love the others more, even if you are a lapsed vegetarian.  It's a hard world, and ultimately (as someone said to me the other day), we all forgive each other.  I don't yet believe this, but I want to.  Perhaps this is a step away from romantic love.  And so is Raymond Carver's 'Late Fragment', but I will put it here all the same.

                           And did you get what
                           you wanted from this life, even so?
                           I did.
                           And what did you want?
                           To call myself beloved, to feel myself
                           beloved on the earth.

Soup and Substance

The leaves are nearly all blown from my next-neighbour-but-one's giant ash tree.  How did that happen?  I looked up from my notebook and there they were, the bare branches.  Last time I looked they were full of green and red.  A couple of writing buddies came over.  Candles were lit, coffee and fruit tea made, buckwheat crackers (yes) on the table.  But recent events and yesterday's activities (workshopping and choir practice) have sucked the marrow from my bones.  No inner substance, no writing, not even dishwater writing - the kind you pull the plug on when it's done.  I left buddies to their notebooks and mugs of fruit tea and went upstairs to the living room and looked at the sky, which was grey and unforgiving, but still, looking at the sky, and tree tops is something I need to do to replenish substance.  Rooftops are also good.  I have made more soup, sweet potato and lentil this time, some of which will soon be going to mater and co where it will either be eaten or left in the fridge until it has gone past its eat-by and thrown away.  You will be wondering how it is that I had the wherewithal to make soup, in the light of what I have said about substance.  But soup is like that - you can make it, literally, with almost nothing, a few bones, an old carrot, a handful of beans - and you can make it when you feel innerly without substance.  The mater knows this, or used to.  Her own grandmother made soup, she said, by singing into a pot.  Sometimes I don't even sing.  But the pot fills anyway.

Cafe Culture

I am aware that it begins to seem as though I spend my life swanning from one cafe to another.  Good, because what I am actually doing most of the time is negotiating paralysingly difficult circumstances surrounding the mater's recent operation and the aftermath thereof.  I would rather live in what seems, and this out-to-lunch moment with the daughter in a local cafe so cool it would not be out of place in trendy Broadway Market fits the bill nicely.  Yes, life is a bowl of perfectly-sizzled hand-cut chips, and a bacon burger with "onion marmalade" on a wooden block.  If burger-on-the-block conjures up unsavoury resonances let us push them aside.

Well, that was yesterday.  And today I went to another place - the community centre cafe which operates three days a week from the old village school.  The people that go there are mainly old, infirm or with small child, the cooks and waiters are volunteers and the food is best of 1950s and cheap.  The cafe is held in what used to be the school assembly hall - all they have done is put a kitchen at one end and get tables and chairs.  On the wall facing the large windows there is a mural, a collective effort by many children, called Our Village.  There are bookcases full of paperbacks to buy for 10p and small glass vases with little fresh flowers on each table. It is one of my favourite places and if I get to heaven any time soon I will organise a welcome party for the volunteers, when their time comes.

Harbour

So there we were, it being Friday, eating our fish and chips. From the photo, it looks as though there are not many people about, but the tiny place was packed, not just with people sitting but queues of folk waiting for their takeaways and I would lay a bet that not many of those were practising Roman Catholics.  But fish on Fridays is somewhere to go, isn't it - somewhere to locate ourselves in these Godless and, some might say, God-forsaken times.  Like pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, chocolate eggs at Easter, Turkey at Christmas, it gives a kind of rhythm to the weeks and months and the ancient hearth is, if not exactly renewed, then at least not entirely lost.  We feel it somewhere in the body of us.  The fish bar is not anywhere near a harbour, but that doesn't matter.  There is a drawing of fishing boats on the menu, we know that fish come from the sea and we can imagine ourselves near it, salt spray in the air and the mew of a seagull.

The mater and her new half-hip are back at home with zimmer frame, walking sticks and codeine for pain relief.  Old age, rather like M.E., isn't for wimps, and until now the mater has been sprightly with weekly Pilates, acqua aerobics and constantly moving about.  Unsurprisingly, she doesn't like this state of affairs.  In the fish bar Mr. Signs and I got to talking about how it would be when we are nearly ninety.  He reckoned that by then he would be long dead as his parents didn't make it beyond eighty.  I reckoned that I ought to be dead before him because M.E. does do that to a life - shorten it, I mean.  But because it has taken so much of the living I would like to have done, I feel I am owed something in the way of payback time so don't accept that I won't make ninety and beyond, whatever the statistics.  When the great big ship with the black sails comes in, will we be standing at the harbour meekly waiting to be taken?  I suppose that is the best way to go - gently into that good night.  But right now I can't see it.

There happens to be a Sandy Denny retrospective on the box as I speak, so it seems right and fitting to echo the lady:

And I know you won't believe me though it is the truth to tell

that the living it is hard, oh but it suits me well.

Though truth to tell (mine) I want for the living to be easy sometimes, the years to keep on turning, with pancakes in their season, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, a bit of singing and dancing - fish and chips on a Friday.

Spirit of NaNo

I have just eaten a packet of Monster Munch and am suddenly thinking about the woman with selective eating disorder who eats nothing else, and the six-year-old girl whose mother left her alone in the house for five days with nothing to eat but packets of those.  Both survived and survive, though obviously it isn't food.  The young girl's case was clearly one of child-neglect, but the other is a grown woman who seems to suffer no major ill-effects.  We do not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of god, so it is written.  Perhaps the woman's faith is very strong or she has another source from which to draw the vital forces one needs in order to live.  I have a healthy diet with organic vegetables, fruit, meat, whole grains and pulses.  But the woman who only eats Monster Munch is stronger and possibly healthier than I am.  All she suffers is brittle nails.  Some things are just mysterious and one accepts this.

Last night was the first Halloween for many years that we did not put a carved pumpkin on the hedge to show itinerant vampires, ghouls and witches that they could come and knock for sweets.  I know this is one of the winter shine-your-light-in-the-darkness festivals, but actually, I should have medals for doing this for, well - much of my life, really.  Last night the wick had burned down to almost nothing.  It revived a bit after the good words of a friend (we do not live by bread alone), chocolate and prescription drugs - good things all three, and I do not despise them.

And now it is that time of year again and I am back in the frolick and fun that is NaNoWriMo.  In my fashion.  One year I nearly killed myself with word-count frenzy, another I came down with swine flu and really, a diet of a thousand words a day is respectable enough in my yet-to-be-written book.  So I will be embracing the spirit of NaNo without the caffeine overload or sleepless nights which, actually, I already have.

It is also the Daughter's birthday.  This, and the fact of her existence, makes me very happy.

M.E./Parmigiana

Two things on my mind today: M.E.-related stuff and Aubergine Parmigiana.

M.E. politics is so big and so deep and so messy that it's difficult to even begin talking about it.  M.E. is a neuroimmune disease - not a mental illness, not psychosomatic, not the same as generalised chronic fatigue.  This is known, recognised, understood, despite the clear necessity for continuing research.  There are those who find it very important to distort or suppress the truth.  Meanwhile thousands continue to suffer without medical or social support - some in almost unimagineable conditions.  Worth remembering the next time you read about M.E. Militants. Yes, they have sent journalists death threats.  Not good.  How is it that they have become so enraged?  And why?

Ok, food.  Family (including one vegetarian) coming for lunch on Sunday and I'd like to find a way of making the above, but without all the faff of frying each piece of aubergine because this is a long process and I can't stand for long periods (orthostatic intolerance, as any PWME fule kno).  I am thinking of cheating and baking the aubergine first but am open to advice - and suspect there may be one or two looking in here who can give it. 

Thanking you in advance (I'm lookin' atcha, Madonna!).

Potage

One of those days when it did not seem possible to move from a lying-down position for a couple of hours after waking, and the view through wooden slats much the same as it was a couple of posts back.  Just to keep you fully in the picture.  After this, the only possible thing to do was to make vegetable soup.  In fact, I will go out on a limb here and say that When In Doubt Make Soup is probably good for almost any situation - as long as you are fit enough and able to remain in an upright, preferably standing, position for as long as it takes to make it which, as you can see, I was.  

There is some small fame attached to the pot, which dates back to the years of my first marriage and about which I once wrote a poem.

Steel Pot

This was my first wedding gift,

a steel pot with black plastic handle,

nothing showy, nothing to show

but empty space and a dull shine.

We made Russian toffee which

blackened and burned, I battered it with knives

and wire wool, I made my mark,

three days I left it in the rain,

It was gentle with eggs,

imaginative with lentils, kind to milk,

rice it loved best, it kept a little back,

a nutty crust we peeled and ate like bread,

the grains were patterned on its metal skin.

Steel is hard and true, people

come and go, my young husband

went north with a broken heart,

three days I waited, but

you can’t scratch marks from hearts

once you have burned them.

I walked into the wilderness,

a knife in my pocket and a wooden spoon.

The steel pot was my hearth,

I sang into its empty space

like my grandmother’s mother

who could (as they say) make soup

by singing into a pot,

and just as well.

I lean and look inside and still

it gives my reflection back to me.

In the Teeth (2)

In Brighton for the first time in weeks, laid up - in particular, because of recovering from dental anaesthetic. Tooth trouble, and more to come - root canal etc. which may or may not work.

In the dentist's room I try to have the conversation (he being new to me and my Condition) about M.E. and after-effects of things like anaesthetic and antibiotics. He picks up that something, at any rate is amiss (I had seemed so nice, grateful, amenable), and fears that I might be about to make some kind of scene. He doesn't begin to have a clue what I am on about. Never mind, for something has to be done, whatever.

I am bruised and super-myalgic from injections, and the rogue nerve is still in me causing toothache. More treatment and injections next week - a two-hour appointment, but at times like this toothache is king.

The food regime continues, after a fashion, though it scarcely seems possible to be eating vegetables plus prescribed amounts of protein and carbs every two hours (to calm the blood sugar situation, to alkalinise the environment that is me). So I cheat, with spelt crackers and oat cakes. What? Those plus hummus and a carrot stick equal carb, protein and veg. Today's fish and chips at lunch do not, but give me a break. The cup of decaf tea with milk and a knife-end of honey is also not kosher, but I am in dire need of the small comfort it gives me - and it washes down the Anadin I have just swallowed.

Son of Signs is in Trinidad right now, where the warm rains come down monsoon-like for a short space most days. Brighton monsoon rain is a more dreary affair, but still, it caught my attention this afternoon. A lone pigeon was sheltering on the railing outside the bedroom window and giving me the eye. We kept each other company for a good half hour until I asked Mr. Signs to take a photograph, and then it turned its back.

vegetable wars

I like my new Health Practitioner. This is good because I feel committed to this road I have unexpectedly taken, and may be with her for some time. I have nothing to lose except money, and she is better value than Shrink, whatever the outcome. M.E. god is offended and fighting me with every means at its disposal. I am fighting back with vegetables and a conviction that things have got to be better than this, and will be. I am not sure where the conviction comes from. It rather goes against what one knows about M.E. But I am nothing if not open-minded (just don't remind me about the Lightning Process). I am changing the environment of me, the inside of me I mean, you know - guts, tubes, intestines and whatnot - working from the inside out. I'll keep you informed.
So this is the project right now. Mr. Signs is away in the States on business and I have given myself body and soul to my own business, which is food preparation and trying to get the eating of it (timing, quantities) right. The cat is happy because I spend more time in the kitchen, which she likes, or in bed. She never did like me staring at a screen and tapping keys.

I met a woman in the village today who I haven't seen for some years. She said, you used to write all those - things, didn't you? I don't know if she had actually read or heard any of my things, but I suppose one has a reputation. She wanted to know if I was still doing that. I said yes. Because it's still what I'm for, the Writing, and will be - when I get stronger.

Voodoo Lily

They are back again. Sweet neighbour came and alerted us yesterday. Well, she has an interest because one of them grows near her garden. They smell of rotting corpses, you see - not that I have ever smelled one of those, but it is apparently an established fact that this is what they smell of and I can vouch that it is probably one of the worst smells ever. Flies love them, as you would expect. They are also known as Dracuncula Vulgaris - good name, lots of appropriate resonances.

It does make you wonder, I think, what kind of a god could have conceived of such a thing. It is both ugly and ridiculous with its ostentatious black penis surrounded by faux Hawaii shirt. It is something that was cobbled together as a bad joke, like sending a really vulgar stripogrammer, unnanounced, to someone's house :

Let us fashion something flamboyant and horrible that stinketh to high heaven, saith god. And this year, let us put it right back in Signs's garden in the place from which it was painstakingly dug up last year, by the roots.

Why have you done this, god?

Because I can, s/he saith, can't you take a joke?

So anyway, someone (not me) is going to have to dig them up again before they manifest their peculiar properties. Sorry god.

It being Shrove Tuesday, one of Mr. Signs's favourite religious festivals, I have prepared batter, fabulously caramelised stewed plums, got the creme fraiche, maple syrup, lemons and caster sugar. It is all we are having for supper tonight before Mr. S watches the Arsenal match tonight and I go back to choir. I have added an extra egg - turns out better that way.

oh sugar!

I wrote a long and diverting post all about seagulls and fried doughnuts (with vanilla sugar) - and somehow it has got itself disappeared and I can't restore it. So you will just have to imagine what it is that I have said, and perhaps what you imagine will be better than the post actually was. Though nothing can beat the actuality of a hot fried doughnut on Brighton Pier under a smoke-gry sky with a needling wind in your face.

free lunch

More of this perishing cold weather but the sun shineth and I have a casserole - pork with orange and star anise, ready in the slow cooker which has been doing its slow thing through the night in preparation for a visit to Brighton flat by Mater and spouse. Pork, you might say, is a funny thing for a vegetarian to be preparing, but I have relented somewhat. That isn't the right word but I prefer it to 'relapsed' which doesn't feel right either. The cold weather plus cooking for others means casserole, means meat. I am ok eating it occasionally but do not find I want it more than this. Mater's spouse simply wouldn't know what to do with a chick pea.

I went to a poetry workshop in the large Quaker meeting house near the sea front yesterday - the workshop leader someone I know well. The room we sat in was so reminiscent of the kind of rooms I used to teach in, and indeed the room where I attended my very first writing workshop. A combination of shabby and generous, high ceilings, old boards made of compressed sawdust, painted blue, with dog-eared notices about watercolour and meditation classes. Central heating radiators enormous and inefficient. Someone left urns full of boiled water, but nothing to make coffee or tea with. The class happened to coincide with a Make Brighton Healthy day - lovely free lunch for anyone who wanted (veg soup, tabbouleh, salads, fresh juices) and complementary therapies.

Sometimes there is such a thing as a free lunch.

equinox

Equinox winds and the first sighting of a proper turning - my next-but-one neighbour's giant ash tree going red. This tree has been the cause of some dispute between neighbours on either side of him because it blocks light from their gardens. Ash tree neighbour is a not man of many words but has made it clear that he won't cut it down. I am not affected but have sympathy for all parties. Last year we took down a fruiting cherry tree because it took light from neighbour's vegetable patch, and that was hard enough. To take down an ash tree of that size when you have lived with it for most of your life would be hard indeed, especially if you are a man of few words whose wife has left you and you are trying to hang on to the rhythm of life as you have always known it. From my window I see gnome-like creatures standing underneath the branches by a clump of bracken. They are actually Bill and Ben (the Flowerpot Men), with a representation of Little Weed in the middle. There is an absence of colour to them and their faces have a ghostly pallor.

A day of shivering, scooting out in the rain to get duvets from the launderette and so back to bed with Breath by Tim Winton, recommended by Ms Pants ages ago, it's as good as she said it would be and I am getting heady fixes of vicarious thrills. Joining a reading group turned out to be one of my better try-outs (unlike swimming, which flopped). Brain is getting the message that it can keep doing this. One has to keep testing the boundaries of what is possible.

Even so, I shiver, I ache. I sleep for an hour and feel worse. I get into the bath, which some people describe as Japanese because of its dimensions, being more of a tub that you can sit in with water coming up to your neck. It's there because the bathroom at Signs Cottage is so small but I like it more than conventional baths. Immersed in hot water, I still can't get warm. Equinox winds and the season's turning: I love autumn, but always forget how changing from one season to another takes it out of me. And last night I went to a poetry reading in Lewes which was good, but as soon as I arrived I knew I would need propping up with coffee, which I had plentifully with apple cake, but still I came home and slept like a stone.

A supper of fish and chips in town, followed by a trip to a strangely gutted Sainsbury's for coffee, cleaning materials and bin bags for the weekend ahead when the Signs children are coming to help excavate the loft and celebrate my birthday. Two episodes of Mad Men - our new boxed set thing, which I'm sure I wouldn't be enjoying as much as I do if I hadn't partly reacquired the novel-reading faculty. And then toast and marmite and two tubes of Mentos, fruit and mint. I am eating strangely at the moment, sometimes having Rich Tea biscuits in place of proper food, but seem none the worse for it and have unaccountably lost the pounds I put on in Berlin.

Daughter has promised a sea-food risotto tomorrow. I think Son is making sticky toffee pudding. Lovely.

the day today

I have just eaten a bacon sandwich. This isn't meant as a confession - I don't feel virtuous about being a vegetarian, I just fell into being one because I stopped wanting to eat meat. Why it should feel more ok to have the occasional bit of cured pork rather than, say, a fillet steak (which I used to adore), I don't know; one of the reasons I stopped wanting to have meat was because I began to shudder at the notion of eating living, sentient creatures. And I once had an intense eye-to-eye encounter with a pig on an organic farm that I can only describe as a meeting of souls. Ah, go ahead, tell me I've got the soul of a pig! But the pig in question was a very intelligent one and quite clearly had a soul that was finer and infinitely more sympathetic than many human creatures one encounters (or perhaps I'm just turning into a veggie/misanthrope type). We had a connection.

It's a symptom of how things are. My already-delinquent immune system is misbehaving. I'll skip the dreary facts, but one of the side-effects is that I don't actually seem to be properly absorbing nutrients. I eat plenty fish, pulses, tofu and what-have-you but nothing ever seems to hit the spot. No wonder I'm thinking about cake and chocolate all the time. Or is that just greed? No, shut up, inner malicious voice, the malabsorption thing is an established fact - and greed also perhaps, but shut up anyway. I need to be kind to myself, and that means schokolade, kaffee und kuchen mit the odd roll-up cigarette (how the devil did that creep in?) and glass of prosecco. Actually, boringly, it means none of those things, it means regular, small, bland, low-fat, nutrient-dense snacklets, it means calming everything down, not doing the regular swimming thing, immune system clearly sees this as a call to arms.

I went into the sea twice with Daughter on the weekend. There is simply nothing like it and how many days in the year can one do that in Blighty anyway? Today, back on the Edge, the wind is gusting about, bending the top of our remaining cherry tree, reminding me that we must get it cut back this year. Everything wants to become forest here. The gravel path that leads to the lawn and apple tree is covered with bracken and something else that I don't know the name of.

It's too early for autumn.

Food Stuff

I am trying to remember what I ate as a child when I was at home, and I can't. I think my sister is the same - last year she said to me, I can't remember anyone cooking for me except you. If this were true then she would have lived on fridge leftovers mixed with baked beans and curry powder - and own-style chappatis. I sometimes cooked that kind of thing when we were alone. There obviously were people who cooked for us, but because life was so episodic the kind of thing we had one year would be completely different from the next. My mother used to say that she didn't cook: she prepared food, and this is consistent with what I remember. Cervelat slices from Panzer's delicatessen, asparagus in spring, strawberries in the summer. There was no sweating over a hot stove. Ryvita and Marmite was as close as she got to regular, mundane fare, and she was often a busy, working woman. Meals were prepared by whichever au pair was on duty or by my stepfather, who worked from home. But au pairs changed annually or with the season and my stepfather was only with us for five years.

I can remember exactly the kind of thing I ate for school dinner at one of my primary schools because I was there for three years (the longest stretch at any school). I was still getting used to English food after three years in Germany. My idea of lunch was a salami sandwich on slightly sour, densely-textured bread, with radishes and raw carrots on the side. I liked sauerkraut, dark lentil soup, frankfurters with mustard. English school dinners with dead man's leg, rank cabbage and scoops of lumpy mash were a daily obstacle. I even hated the steamed puddings and custard at first. But at least I remember the type of thing there was. It locates me in time and place.

I taught myself to cook on a Baby Belling in a West Hampstead bedsit. I didn't have a cook book to look things up, I just experimented. When I was given a copy of Georgina Horley's Good Food on a Budget I learned how to make a white sauce. Elizabeth David taught me to marinate and I got to know Delia Smith because for some years she had a regular column in the Evening Standard. I think Nigel Slater said something about having learned to cook because he was hungry. I was hungry - not just for food, but for home. Cooking something in a pot was a way of making a hearth. Long before I had children I cooked, and was known for it. Friends came knowing there would be something good. I was lucky that my children never really had food fads, they usually liked what I made and meals gave significant rhythm to our lives. I always said that I could never understand people who didn't bother to cook properly if they lived on their own. I would always, I said, take the time to make something - take the trouble and do it properly. It was part of who I was.

I don't know when it happened, the passing from one way of being to another. Perhaps when my son, my youngest, began at university - but that wouldn't quite explain it because I always cooked. Perhaps it was having to give up regular teaching work because of illness, seeing how precious my small measure of strength was, reconsidering what I might spend it on. And losing the taste for meat. Whatever, I don't much like cooking any more. I like food and convivial meals, and blood sugar levels cry out if meals aren't regular. But all of a sudden, it seems, I am happy to have baked beans for lunch several days in a row, fish fingers for supper (quite healthy with fresh steamed veg) twice a week. And lovely free range eggs, poached or boiled, with toast. Finding good, cheap places in Brighton where I can eat out and avoid cooking at all makes me happy.

It is the birthday of Mr. Signs tomorrow. We will have cake and sandwiches with neighbours, and again on the weekend in Brighton with children and others. I won't be baking anything, not even a batch of Betty Crocker's Brownie's. I may even use Waitrose deli fillers for the sandwiches. I will choose nice things and there will be raw carrots, celery and cucumber to dip and crunch.

The mater will understand this sea-change. At last - a chip off the old block.

Vegetarian

I don't know how this happened. The crunch was a tiny piece of bone in an IKEA meatball on Wednesday evening when we went to look at sinks and sofabeds. IKEA is exhausting, just as all large stores are exhausting, something to do with the lighting and formaldehyde, or chemicals in the furnishings, I have stopped trying to work it out, and mostly try not to go to these places. The meatballs and lingonberry sauce, have always been our consolation prize. Bleached out on a lime-green sofa, staring into a rectangular oblong of porcelain (but how does the water run out?), it was ok because in a minute we would go and have meatballs with lingonberry and chips. The bone fragment shouldn't have been there, it was a one-off, but fate arranged it so that we would come up against each other when I was wavering and vulnerable - about the whole business of eating meat, I mean. I have found myself wanting it less and less, choosing the vegetarian option when we went out, sensing an unfamiliar squeamishness in myself when looking at a tray of skinned chicken thighs and latterly (before Jonathan Safran Foer exploded into the scene) questioning whether I felt ok about eating animals at all. I used to. I began not to. I don't know why. It's not as though anything much has changed, and for many years (apart from IKEA meatballs and the occasional hamburger) I've bought responsibly-sourced, organic meat.

It was the piece of bone. It made me think of death, I felt like death. I remembered being five years old and how meatballs used to smell of snot and smoke. I thought about the mangledness of the once-living animal, the fact of it. A shudder was engendered, it is still there and I am not eating meat or wanting to.

I wonder if this will last. I hope so.

getting my oats

Still on the subject of porridge, it having been Burns night and all: we went to our neighbours-over-the-road for the annual haggis-stabbing and a bit of song and dance. Mr. Signs, who is tone deaf, sang his Burns party piece (The Belles of Mauchline) to my guitar accompaniment, Scottish host sang a reggae version of Scots Wha Hae and a lesser-known version of Auld Lang Syne, I sang May You Never (after John Martyn) neighbour-next-door got six of us (though I chickened out half way through) to do a circle dance, following a whisky-tasting session. We ate two different kinds of haggis with neeps and mash, followed by three different kinds of pudding. On the morning of that day I had porridge for breakfast, there was oatmeal in the haggis and in one of the puddings. You could say that I was oatmealed and porridged out, but I have never worried about getting too much of a good thing.
I was too ill to write much last week, but did some editing on a couple of short stories and sent them off, and today went back to the lovely notebook, my big story still warm and waiting for me.
Here's the actual John with the actual song. I can never get too much of this either.

Just Juice

Up the Smoke again to visit the Daughter, the very walls of her lovely little flat (that looks like something created especially for a theatre set) breathing out the atmosphere of creative endeavour, the libretto and musical score of her recently completed musical bearing witness. She cooked prawn and spinach curry for us. I touched in with a dear Smoke-based writerfriend. Bliss. For it has been intense on the domestic front here at Signs Cottage, with Son back working all hours at all sorts to get money for travelling, and Mr. S also time-stretched with work and shrink-training, not to mention artistic creations, some of which now grace the wall of Daughter's flat. (And what am I doing as in, you know, Doing, you are wondering - I will get to that anon - probably).

The one who does the cooking/laundry/dishes is she who isn't out earning money. Stands to reason, and it isn't as though one actually resents it or as if anyone were taking advantage and not pulling their weight around the place. Everyone is doing their best. But it is a problem because of my energy/strength situation: how to fit in The Writing and not just come to it late in the day when it is quite hopeless to think of serious, sustained endeavour. Clue: when I was in the Smoke they had take-away suppers - fish and chips one night and curry the next. Lovely girlperson who comes once a week to clean vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the kitchen floor and changed bedlinen. When I absent myself, life goes on, I can just as well absent myself by going to the study as by going elsewhere and we are all grownups here. Life with small children is a different kettle of fish altogether. But. It does not feel good or right to welcome home the hard-pressed gentlemen folk of the house with nothing and - here is the nub - they and the Daughter are important to me and deserving of my attentions and when chips are down they come first in the scheme of things.

But still. I am determined to crack on with writing project and so have set myself the ridiculous challenge of doing NaNoWriMo this year. The idea came about as I sat outside on my birthday after having too much cake and coffee. Someone said, why don't we do it and I of course, at once, said yes lets, and then if it all went pear-shaped I could blame her for suggesting it. London writerfriend, who knows my situation and is realistic, said I should busy myself with appropriate warm-ups for the rest of this month, so I have been sustaining myself with instant coffee and chocolate, with no observable ill effects, bearing in mind that one is always feeling ill effects of something or other. No, but this is very encouraging, because I will save much time not shopping for and preparing biodynamic salads and raw vegetable juices. My juicer has, in any case, gone back to the chemist that sold it to me because of the particular make being recalled for potentially dangerous flaw in the works. I take this as a Sign - why wouldn't I? Organic juices are time-consuming and preparing them may be hazardous to your wellbeing. Coffee and chocolate rock.

Fifty thousand words in a month? Ha! Watch this space.

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)

light diet

I recently received an email from a writer friend saying that she is on a diet of 1,000 words a day. This is a very respectable diet for any writer to be on and in her case I am quite certain it will be a rich and nutritious one. My own diet doesn’t bear much scrutinty. It is unpredictable and barely enough to keep the writerly body and soul alive. There are binges of notebook writing which we could compare to the pie and chips one might unwisely scoff at 2am after a night out on the tiles; there are snippets of densely poetic utterance – the petits fours that no-one really needs, they are exquisite, delicious and quite forgettable; there are worthy attempts at putting in some solid substance towards ongoing project/s (as I actually don’t know which one I want to go on with it’s a bit random), and this is the brown rice and steamed veg option – you know it’s good for you but without the right condiments and a bit of something extra it just kind of sits there, you put the leftovers in the fridge for the next day and then can’t face eating it all over again so it gets thrown out.

Then there is the meat. I was going to say that vegetarians could substitute this with a protein of their choice (I am partial to tofu, have never quite got my head around quorn), but if I am going to extend the metaphor in a way that has any meaning it really needs to be meat. It is solid, organic, with blood and bones that you can boil up to make a rich stock for soup. Well the truth is I am off meat, literally and metaphorically and if I have to eat it then I don’t want too much of the dark stuff. I lean towards the white and the sweet. But in me, and in the writing, the dark stuff is there and keeps coming. It keeps coming and it isn’t what I want on my plate.

The mater and her spouse are coming for supper tonight and I am making fish pie followed by honey and ginger poached pears with meringue.