Lynne Rees's Blog, page 17

Grow

I am learning it all over again: the delight of picking and eating something you have grown. But perhaps it's not 'all over again', maybe it is for the first time. Dad has kept a vegetable garden since the late 1950s, ever since they moved into the house he and Mam still live in, so as a child I was used to a home-grown harvest of runner beans, broad beans, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and onions with their tops bent over to help them dry a little while still in the earth before being plaited into strings and wintered in the dark of the redundant coal bunker. But 'delight'? No - I took it for granted. These were the years when most people grew something in their gardens; there was nothing unusual about it. It was part of life, part of feeding yourself.
The year after I moved in with Tony he ploughed up half an acre in a field at the front of his house and planted enough vegetables to feed a small village, if they'd all been famished on exactly the same day. The idea of staggered or succession planting came to him rather too late. The cauliflowers were a particular challenge: quantity wise and for the caterpillar nations they attracted. In the end I stopped searching for the tiniest of ones curled between the florets and trusted that hot water would dissolve them. That trust was sometimes misplaced. 
Cox's Orange PippinNow we have a greenhouse, built to house experiments with alternative fruit trees and crops we might end up planting in the orchard in place of the apple trees, mostly Cox's Orange Pippin. The Cox has lost a lot of its popularity as an eating apple but fortunately it makes great juice and we've managed to rent out the 20 acres for the last couple of years to a local fruit grower and juice producer and we're hoping that will continue for the limited number of good fruit producing years the trees have left.

Hungry Writing PromptWrite about what the years ahead of you will contain.
So this year the greenhouse has been commandeered for more domestic crops: Tony has planted cucumbers, tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines, chillies and peppers. And the cucumbers have shot ahead, Mo Farrar like, in the quest to be the first to be applauded. 
Piccolino cucumbersCucumber and cream cheese wraps. Cucumber and paté on wholemeal toast. Cucumber soup (which was so much better chilled and drunk the next day than eaten warm). So, I'm getting through them. And if summer does arrive, and stay for a few days, I'm going to make this Hungarian cucumber salad, a dish that reminds me of a Robert Carrier recipe I followed while I was living in Jersey in the early 1980s, a side-dish for skewered chicken satay, a memory that has remained dormant until now. 
Delia's Cucumber SoupKnowing how complicated Carrier recipes tended to be there must have been more to it than what I remember: peeling the cucumbers, sprinkling them with sugar and salt and leaving them in the fridge for their flavour to deepen. I do remember thinking how exotic it seemed: up until then cucumber had only ever appeared in my life as part of a grated cheddar or tinned pink salmon sandwich. I don't remember who I was cooking for. But there is sunlight in the kitchen, spilling through the window above the fridge and the blue Formica table is laid for four. And there won't be quite enough for all of us to feel satisfied. I have never trusted recipe serving suggestions since.  
Soon there will be a fat purple aubergine. Courgettes, now that the flowers have gone limp and their bodies are filling like inflatable bolster cushions. Then tomatoes of all different sizes. A little later: red peppers. Some of the chillies will have to be dried or given away as presents.

All this green. At first Tony marked the supporting strings with chalk so we could be amazed at how much everything was growing within a day. Now we accept it. But with delight. Both of us are thinking of that first ripe tomato straight from the vine. We're hoping for two. 

Oyster: flesh and bone

At the beginning of last year I left some oyster shells on a friend's fresh grave in Pennard churchyard on the Gower peninsula in South Wales: he loved the sea. I couldn't get to his funeral a few weeks earlier and I wanted to have a chat and say goodbye. So I collected shells from Aberafan Beach, where my parents live, shells washed in from Swansea Bay, a bay we shared during different parts of our lives, relics of an oyster fishing industry that can be dated back to Roman times but which had its heyday in the 19th century. At its peak in 1871 fishermen brought 18 million of them ashore, exporting them to London and Europe, and there's still a seemingly endless supply of sea-rubbed, encrusted half shells to be found on the bay's beaches. 

Oysters are on my mind as I've just come back from Jersey, a nostalgic trip to the island where I lived between 1978 and 1985, where I ate Jersey oysters poached in a champagne butter sauce at The Oyster Box in St Brelade's Bay.

Swansea Bay oysters had fallen into decline in the 1920s from over-fishing, pollution and disease but at the end of 2014 a project, led by marine biologist Dr Andy Woolmer, to repopulate the bay started to show positive results: a brood stock released into a 35-hectare area of sea the previous year were growing and starting to reproduce. 
My friend, Nigel Jenkins (1949 - 2014), would have appreciated this, a man who was deeply connected to his town's and country's heritage and history. He'd have surely written about it in a third Real Swansea if he'd lived. He may even have known Andy Woolmer who completed a PhD studying the seabed of Carmarthen Bay at Swansea university where Nigel led the creative writing programme until the months before his death from pancreatic cancer.
Words and laughter. The two things that come to mind when I think of Nigel. His passion, energy and precision in the former, the rumble of his deep bass voice and genuine enjoyment for life in the latter. 
Jonathan Swift is reported to have said, 'He was a bold man that first ate an oyster'. And you have to agree with him even if you're a big fan of grey, wobbly bi-valves. My first experience of eating them, at an oyster festival in Toronto in 1988, was shored up by several glasses of champagne. My friend told me to swallow them whole and the experience of wet flab slipping into my throat alienated me from them for years.
I met them again in a more positive light, when I was living in Antibes/Juan les Pins, at the exquisite Festival de la Mer, where they were served in the half shell coated in a warm sabayon sauce and flashed under the grill. Not too dissimilar from the Jersey oysters above, except the latter's sauce was more delicate and seasoned with fresh, chopped chives. 
I am grateful to Nigel Jenkins for the years of his friendship. In my last letter to him in December 2013 I told him, I want you to stay around for a long time. For Margot and your daughters and close friends. And selfishly for me too. When you like people, and they feel that warmth, it makes a difference to their lives, Nigel. Maybe because they know – I know – that you do not tolerate navel-gazers and clever dicks and pomposity! So we feel saved!  

Hungry writing promptWrite about being saved or saving someone.
But I am grateful to him for his support and encouragement too: his invitations to edit and teach with him, how his belief in me as a a writer convinced me I could write a good Real Port Talbot. 
The word 'oyster' has its origins in the Greek ostreon, related to osteon meaning 'bone'. We also tend to think about oysters in conjunction with pearls, and the enduring myth of how an irritating grain of sand transforms into a thing of beauty. The reality is even more wondrous:  
It is thought that natural pearls form under a set of accidental conditions when a microscopic intruder or parasite enters a bivalve mollusc and settles inside the shell. The mollusc, irritated by the intruder, forms a pearl sac of external mantle tissue cells and secretes the calcium carbonate and conchiolin to cover the irritant. This secretion process is repeated many times, thus producing a pearl. Natural pearls come in many shapes, with perfectly round ones being comparatively rare. Wikipedia
Oyster. Flesh and bone. The health of which we all rely on for each and every tenuous day of lives. 'Accidental conditions': how else to explain those cruel, indiscriminate cells?
What did I talk about as I settled the oyster shells on the corner of Nigel's grave? I apologised for the Aberafan shells in favour of the Swansea ones he once pointed out to me on the beach near the marina there. And I swore about the damn unfairness of his death. And I told him about my dead Carmarthen grandmothers, their footsteps I was tracking along lanes between church and farm, from village to village in the 18th and 19th centuries. About running like a startled whippet along one lane too narrow to accommodate a whippet plus a convoy of monster tractors and trailers! You gave me this, I told him, the idea I could write their stories, that I could conjure them back to flesh and bone. And then I said thank you and went home.

Sweetie

In January I blogged about 'The Year of Eating Everything' and while I started out brimming with enthusiasm and good intentions not to throw any food away I have to be honest and say it's been more 'The Year of Eating Mostly Everything' so far. Damn those little salad bags that turn all seaweedy if you open one and forget about it for a few days. 
But this week's experiment might compensate for any previous failings. In fact, I didn't even consider this particular food item as something that should or could be eaten when I wrote that post. You probably wouldn't have either. 
Can you tell what it is yet?No, not worms. Candied orange peel. Made from the peel of some large dessert oranges we've been buying from our local garage's inspirationally stocked Spar Parkfoot supermarket near West Malling, Kent. (It was voted Convenience Retailer of the Year in 2014 as well as Best Independent Store and Best Chilled Retailer.) 
However, now I've Googled 'candied orange peel' it appears that the world is already awash with knowledge and recipes... but I am taking a big chunk of satisfaction from the fact that the process I made up as I went along is pretty much identical to the BBC's Good Food recipe here. Except I didn't change the water as instructed in Stage 2 - let's hope there's nothing nutritionally toxic in that oversight! 
I've yet to try dipping them in chocolate, as this and other on-line recipes suggest, but I might give that a go the next time we have people around for dinner and serve them with coffee. But for now I'm just enjoying their chewy, slightly bitter and crunchy sugariness: they are better than fruit gums, or wine gums, or any other shop bought fruity rubbery sweet. 
I'm now inspired to try lemon and lime peel. Grapefruit too. I'm wondering about the subtleties of flavour between clementine and mandarin peel, between common and garden lemons and Meyer lemons. 
You know how there are always new songs being written, new musical arrangements that move and astonish us even though there are only 88 keys and 7 octaves on a piano keyboard? How with only 26 letters in the alphabet writers keep on assembling them into words and creating stories we could not have imagined?  
I feel like that about my little culinary discoveries sometimes. Small leaps of imagination and curiosity that produce something new, or new to me at least.
Wonder. I guess that's what we all must have and pursue. It brings light to our lives.   
Hungry Writing PromptWrite about some wondrous things.

Birthday breakfast and writing for someone you love

It's Tony birthday today and we've just had his birthday brunch made with eggs from a local farm whose shells cracked with an ease and precision I have never known from shop-bought eggs (Note to self: find out why...) and whose yolks were as yellow as buttercups. 
scrambled eggs with creme fraiche and smoked salmon on buttered sourdough toastI left Jersey and moved to Kent to be with him on his birthday in 1985 and I remember standing in the open doorway in the kitchen of his ragstone cottage looking at the acres of grass and trees that surrounded it and wondering how I might find my place there. And that thought led me to this year's birthday prose poem for him.
View-maker
The first one you’d already made: from the doorway of the kitchen I looked across grass to a greenhouse, a swimming pool and tennis court, and beyond, the driveway’s arc of shingle. Then you gave me stone and the sound of water: a cobbled yard, a blooming meniscus of lilies where once a dragon fly landed on my knee. Later you raised the walls of a garden room, crowned them with a roof that curved to a peak, like the ideas for a book taking shape inside my head. Then you presented me with the North Downs and ten thousand apple trees, but brought them nearer so I could walk out, barefoot if I chose, into the green. Today there is cherry blossom outside my door. I watch the drift of bees, their industry that seems so effortless: you are like this. You lay your hands to wood and stone, glass and earth with such patience, such joy, an absence of burden. You gaze across a landscape and see the possibilities there: how a wall needs to curve, how one fruit tree will replace another. How there is always something over the next horizon. 
Happy birthday, TB. Love, always.

Hungry writing promptWrite about the view from your window.

Meal for one

This is not say that I don't love you but now I have waved you off to London for the evening and I have cleaned the kitchen floor, showered and changed, lit the wood-burning stove to counter the chill of the late April air, I am just so happy to be here alone in our yellow kitchen, slicing the buttered and peppered Jersey Royals left over from last night's dinner, chopping a small red onion, snipping chives into confetti, whisking two eggs and sipping cold white wine.


It seems that omelettes were made for solitude, made for one. They slip out of their pans and onto a single plate. They yield to a fork held in one hand. And this one asks to be eaten here and now, after I've sliced it into four and layered it beside a small nest of rocket drizzled with oil, while I'm still standing at the kitchen bar. No etiquette of table or table-mat, no knife, no napkin. Not a single spoken word.  


This is not to say that I don't love you but the last slice I thought I'd never eat, the slice too far, the one I thought I'd keep for you when you came home, the snack you might be thinking of when you came through the door, the one I dressed with a spear of chive just for you, has also gone. This was always meant to be a meal for one. 


Hungry Writing PromptWrite about being away from someone you love.

International Haiku Poetry Day

Or, on this blog, International Haiku Poetry About Food & Drink Day!

making soupmy hands could bemy mother's hands






no one knowswhat I'm talking about...pumpkin pie









morning coffeea list of things I believeI will do today




Hungry Writing PromptWrite about the poetry in your life.

What mothers give us

Here is my mother's pressed glass cake stand, one of her wedding gifts from 1952, that she gave me some time ago. It's moved houses in Kent, and travelled with me to the South of France and back again. 

In her personal essay, 'My Mother's Blue Bowl'*, Alice Walker says, of the two bowls her mother gave her: [My mother] taught me a lesson about letting go of possessions - easily, without emphasis or regret.
That's how I feel about my mother's gift to me.
Hungry Writing PromptWrite about something your mother gave you.
It also feels like a part of my mother's life. For the first few years after her marriage she lived with her in-laws and she remembers her mother-in-law, Catherine Rees, asking if she would please teach her how to make one of her light and fluffy Victoria Sponges. 'She was so humble,' my mother still says of her. To welcome another woman into your home and your kitchen is not always an easy thing to do. And I remember my mother making cakes when I was small - how my sister and I negotiated who would get to lick the bowl and who would get the spoon, eyeing up and measuring the smears of cake mixture remaining on both.
And here's a glass plate and dome that I brought home from Tony's mother's house when we were clearing it out after she died in 1998.

I think this must be French Luminarc or Arcoroc tempered glassware, as 'France' is stamped in tiny letters on the top of the lid, and it could date from anywhere between the 1960s and the 1980s.
I knew Tony's mother, Lilian, for 12 years but I cannot remember her ever using the glass domed plate. In fact, Tony can't remember it at all so she must have bought it after he left home in 1964. Maybe it was a one-off purchase, bought for a single occasion, a birthday or Christmas perhaps, then stored in the back of a cupboard for the rest of the time. But it still feels a part of who she was: it's big airy dome and large plate like a symbol of her generous and wonderfully transparent nature.
I use them both. For every day meals and for celebrations. They hold Welshcakes, banana bread, slices of Bara Brith, apple and sultana cake, open tarts, even cheese and grapes. They instil in me a sense of the vertical in history, not just horizontal, linear time, a sense of the years passing, but the repetition of habits and actions performed by women. And how that feels as if it starts deep in the earth beneath my feet and ascends through me and my life. And will carry on growing higher after I'm gone, not through any children of my own but through the daughters, and maybe sons, who are part of my extended family. I name them now: Ffion, Iwan, Manon, Morgan, Harri, Summer, Oliver. History builders. 
* From A Slice of Life, Contemporary Writers on Food, ed. Bonnie Marranca, first published by Overlook Duckworth 2005.

The Only Way is Running

And take-offs! Unexpected drama this morning at the doctor's surgery at Kings Hill, a brand new village built over the last 25 years on the former site of RAF West Malling, when a petite and glamorous young woman appeared to mistake it for the set of that bastion of English culture, The Only Way is Essex (good taste prevents me from sharing a link). 

Now, I've only ever seen the trailers so perhaps my opinion is uninformed but that was my immediate response. Not because of any one thing about her though. It was more the accumulation of details (the most superbly fitted velour tracksuit I've ever seen, brand new Ugg boots, bouncy blonde pony tail, spray tan, false eyelashes and nails, a gorgeously pert pair of breasts, a tiny waist and a Smartphone surgically attached to her palm) combined with her behaviour (stalking back and forth in front of the reception desk, some heavy duty finger pointing, and admirably articulate yelling for 'Nicola' to come out and speak to her 'face to face'). When she turned around to the captive audience in the waiting room and asked us, 'Do any of you think the receptionists here are a load of snotty bitches?' there was a split-second of felt, though unspoken, support - I reckon nearly everyone's had to deal with a jobs-worthy, intractable doctor's receptionist at some point. But when the maligned Nicola appeared from behind a partition, visibly shaken and pale, and whispered that she'd hung up on her because she didn't like being shouted at any potential tide of sympathy shifted firmly in the other direction. 
The confrontation peaked when Ms TOWIE shouted, Yes, she would leave the surgery now she'd taught Nicola a lesson, oh yes, she'd taught Nicola a lesson she had, and she swept her wonderful breasts around and managed to lift her little Ugg feet over the rope barrier just in time to avoid the most spectacular of fails for a dramatic exit. 
It was a welcome shift back to normality though the room, and all of us in it, did seem a little dowdy and grey, just for a moment. 
Whether all this has anything to do with my intention for this blogpost remains to be seen... 

Regular readers might remember my post Welcome to the Hotel Decrepitude back in December 2013 where I bleated about, among other things, high cholesterol. There wasn't a great deal I could do to improve an already healthy diet but after 6 months of denying myself butter and knocking back cholesterol lowering yoghurt drinks nearly every day surely there'd be a significant drop? There wasn't. So I welcomed back the butter and abandoned the yoghurt fixes and tried not to listen to the voice in the back of my head who knew exactly what I had to do: get off my arse and move more. 
By the end of October last year I couldn't ignore her any longer so I set myself a 30 day programme of walking/running on the treadmill for 30 minutes every day with the goal of running 3 miles non-stop at the end of it. And I did. And I've kept up the running ever since, on lanes footpaths and parks, building to about 15+ miles a week. I've also signed up for three 10km runs during the next 8 months. 
Apart from the benefit of feeling so much more alive and vital, physically and mentally, and enjoying the natural landscape I'm running through, it seems I've also cracked the cholesterol problem. At a British Heart Foundation charitable 'healthy heart check' a couple of weeks ago my overall cholesterol level was 3.8 (down from 6.7). I know! OMG as they say in TOWIE.

Today's appointment was at my doctor's request for a more detailed cholesterol test broken down into the good, the bad, and the something else and I am, of course, hoping that this tests confirms the previous simple 'finger-prick' result. There's no reason why it shouldn't.

When I left the surgery I spent some time looking at the word sculptures (created by the culture and place-making consultancy, FutureCity) set into the paving stones and garden area around the old airfield's Control Tower (now Costa Coffee). The RAF Roundel at the back of the tower is constructed of words we associate with British war movies - chocks, boffins, Blighty - and the brief tales of airmen who flew from the station during and after the Second World War. The seating roundel at the front of the tower has a story you can read by slowly circling the wooden bench, your eyes following the trail of words from the outer rim to the heart.

I'm pleased the developers, planners and designers have remembered the land's past with words. So much history is held in the voices of ordinary people. Stories that often don't make it to academic history books. 



And here is Commander A Humphrey, 60 years later, still enjoying his Kent strawberries at a pub in nearby Teston, the blood in his veins still fizzing from his airborne success. 

It seems there's always food at the end of every good story. 


Hungry Writing PromptWrite about flight.

Meaningful

I am struggling to be meaningful this week. I am juggling the ingredients of lasagne, a family lunch, watching a child grow into an independent adult, running, daffodil bulbs and poetry with no sign that any of them want to sit next to each other on the plate of my blogpost. 
The closest I've got to words suggesting more than their plain, unsalted selves is:
family lunchsqueezing in anotherlayer of lasagne
Hungry Writing PromptWrite about what family means to you.

This is the lasagne in question: a BBC Good Food recipe whose one and a half litres of milk for the béchamel sauce made my head swivel between the recipe and the biggest measuring jug I have in the kitchen. Does that lower-case 'l' really mean litres?! But it did and, as the five starred recipe reviews suggest, you get one hugely delicious dish of silky savouriness to serve eight. 
Our granddaughter is in her first year of university, studying Costume Interpretation for Theatre & Screen at UAL Wimbledon, and living in halls.
'I know this is a weird thing to ask,' she says, half an hour after arriving for lunch, 'but could I do some laundry?' Her pink duffle-bag is filled with damp clothes she's washed at her mother's house and the tangle of knickers, tops and jumpers yet to be done. She tells me that a load of washing and drying at Halls costs her £10.
And here we are standing together at the sink in the utility room discussing the merits of a Vanish stain removing bar as she rubs gently at some coffee splashes on a pale pink sleeveless top. I have to tilt my head up slightly to look her in the face.
It is when I look at Summer that I feel the passage of time. It becomes more than an intellectual perception, more than a list of occasions, events, holidays, more than a numerical record of the years. I feel it in my body's memory: her three year old palm resting on my face, the weight of her as I lift her to reach a ball trapped in the branches of a tree. And now the warmth of her 19 year old body curled up beside me on the sofa, her knees pushing through the torn denim of her jeans. I rest an arm on her hip as if doing so might keep her here just a little longer. 
Yesterday I ran 5.5 miles with my women's running group. I spent the afternoon planting daffodil bulbs beneath the lawn. Then I read half of Sean Borodale's Human Work , a poetry collection about food, its preparation and transformation, whose words and phrases are surprising, challenging and evocative, but strangely lacking, for me, in any warmth and joy. 
I told you these ingredients were resisting each other's company. But somehow they have taken their place, one by one. No shared meaning. But each meaningful in their own way. 

What your life tastes like

James Wannerton tastes words when he reads or hears them thanks to a neurological condition called synaesthesia that links senses which are normally experienced separately. The Telegraph published this article back in August 2013 about a systems analyst from Blackpool who'd created a version of the London Underground map that, instead of the stations' names, showed what each one tasted like. To James Wannerton that is. He has Victoria down as 'Candle Wax' but Victoria is much more 'Old Sweet Wrapper' for me. But the sweet wrapper I have in mind is the kind of paper that Bazooka Joe bubblegum came wrapped in. And that was waxy. So maybe we aren't that far apart. 
Tastes of London 1964 - 2013You can read more about James Wannerton and browse the whole of the map (with more clarity) by clicking on any of the links above. And I bet you'll immediately check out the stations you're familiar with to see if his taste makes some kind of sense to you. 
Wannerton has been diagnosed with lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, a rare form of synaesthesia in which spoken and written language causes individuals to experience an automatic and highly consistent taste/smell. My 'sweet-wrapper' response to Victoria wasn't at all automatic - but when I imagined myself among the sounds and smells and textures of the railway station that's my gateway into London that's what popped into my head. 
If I think about the 20 acres of orchard outside my back door it would be too easy to say it tastes of apples. Right now it has the taste of soft mud with a hint of earthworm. But in the summer it tastes like Pink Shrimps - you know those old-fashioned spongy sweets? 
You don't have to make logical sense here. It's probably best if you don't even try to as that detracts from the wonder that is our brain. How it makes links between things that can occasionally astonish (and perhaps even confuse) us. 
One of the pieces of advice that I give to apprentice writers is not to edit first thoughts, don't be judgemental at the beginning of the writing process. Just write down everything, however bizarre or boring they might seem. We can never know what might make sense, what might be worth exploring, further down the road. And you don't have to show anyone. No one has to know how barmy you might sound!
Hungry Writing PromptWrite a list of tastes for: the street you live on, the inside of your car, your favourite room in the house, a place you loved from your childhood.
I'm reading in London at the Poetry Society Cafe next Monday, 23rd March. I'll arrive, as usual, at Candle Wax, change at Pea & Ham Soup and get off at Chocolate Digestives. 
I checked out one more station on the map. Paddington Station tastes of Flumps to James Wannerton. I'm going to have to disagree with him there too, because that's the station that rumbles me westwards towards the Severn Estuary and its bridge into Wales. It's Salted Butter.