Jim P-R's Blog

A Patient's Minor Contribution to Medicine

2012-01-27T17:09:00.003Z

I am rather proud of my two contributions to medicine – although I may be the only person to have benefited from them.
Recovering from prostate cancer, I had a catheter fitted that ran from my bladder to a bag strapped to my leg. This bag had to be emptied when it became too heavy for comfort. Then a convenience (often an inconvenience) had to be located, trousers lowered, and urine released.
I had a zip fastener put into the side seam of my trousers from which to extract the drainage tap. Then, even when in public, I could find a drain or flower bed for the purpose. I dubbed it
“The P-R Zip”.

On another occasion, when being released from hospital with a pacemaker, instructions were not to raise my left arm, the side in which the device had been inserted. A reminder was necessary for the following month or so.
I installed a cord (string) loop that rounded and fell from my trouser belt.
With the arm dangling through this loop, there was a restraining reminder whenever I started to raise it. The doctors had not seen one before.
This could be the cheapest medical aid ever invented.
I dubbed it “The P-R Loop”.
The “Loop” can be threaded through a strong safety pin attached to waist-high nightwear.

My other contribution to medicine was only an observation.
In a shaft of sunlight I was using an electric shaver with an oscillating head, and was astounded to see so many small pieces of hair flying about. These, I thought, must be an irritant when breathed in to my ex-TB lung.
I changed quickly to a rotating headed shaver that retains the cut hair.

Background music and nature films

2012-01-22T16:14:00.000Z

Being laid low by a virus infection gave me more time to watch television. Two matters from this have been food for thought.
Years ago I saw a film that had, as one of its scenes, a man crawling through desert sand about to die of thirst. He was accompanied by orchestral music. So I didn’t see why he couldn’t have turned right, crossed a sand dune, and asked a musician for a glass of water.
Much the same situation has been very apparent in a nature series that I saw on the box.
It is true that long-lens photography of animals making a noise is difficult to record. So, somewhere, a sound person might well have been extracting a cork from a bottle each time a penguin rocketed from the water to land on an ice floe.
When making appropriate sounds to fit the action becomes difficult, a full orchestra is brought into play. Natural sounds are then thought by these portrayers of nature to be unnecessary.
But the accompanying orchestras can be so intrusive that the music detracts from the action.
One feels that all might well be reversed. Why not show the orchestra, with a showman of a conductor encouraging his musicians - with a few nature bits superimposed on a backdrop behind him.
Because we, as viewers, especially of nature programmes, have now seen the intimate lives of nearly every bird, insect and beast on this planet, it has become essential with repeat images to announce every so often that: “This is the first time that anyone has seen…”
The makers of these films have not been watching television. Most of us have seen the lot already.
So that is now the new quest when repeating the subject. It is to find something new.
The great fall-back is to film lions chasing wildebeests toward crocodile-infested water.
Now, if one of these wildebeests should reach the water, see a crocodile, take fright, turn back, and fall into the jaws of a lion, that might be new. But do we care any more?

Sirens and red lights

2012-01-11T12:08:00.002Z

Travelling by rail to and from Amsterdam, with a change of trains in Brussels, would seem to be the best method to choose for a winter’s visit. But there was, at Christmastime, a great deal of heavy luggage to lug about at stations.
And then, in Amsterdam, where space is at a premium, and where stairs are unproductive areas of a house with treads narrow and assents steep, heavy suitcases meant that extra muscle power was required.
Probably because of these additional manual matters, my heart acted strangely on our return to London.
When walking along a street I was suddenly short of breath and struggling. Something was not right.
So, for a few days before the New Year, I took my pulse rate at various times of the day and night. It seemed to be extremely low.
Margreet wanted me to see a doctor. An appointment was to be made at the counter of our local health centre, where we learned that no one could see me for several days. At Margreet’s cajoling, the receptionist then found that, due to a cancellation, I could be seen by my own doctor right away.
After the briefest of examinations, she ordered an ambulance and booked me into the cardiac clinic of Hammersmith Hospital.
So, with me in a wheelchair, ambulance paramedics and Margreet, we set off with sirens screaming and red traffic lights ignored.
Wheeled into the hospital for another brief but thorough examination (symptomatic complete heart block), I was put into a bed and connected up to a mass of cables that led to monitors of lights, flashing numbers and noisy alarms.
I was to have a heart pacemaker installed in my chest. These are inserted beneath the collarbone and connected to the heart by two wires. In place, it would result in my heartbeat being under control at a satisfactory level for life. Fine.
Speed was necessary, but I had to be fitted into the pre-arranged surgery programme. It was not until mid-day the following day that the operation took place. Antibiotic pills aplenty were administered.
The surgical procedure was to be conducted with local anaesthetic.
This obviously involved delicacy and, unexpectedly, some brutal force from a surgeon who was discussing his future in medicine with a colleague. The procedure appeared to be a success.
Margreet was much relieved when I appeared from the surgical quarters looking much the same as before.
With some aches and pains and soreness the following day, I dressed to go home. But a final and more comprehensive extra scan revealed that one wire from the pacemaker to the heart had become detached (atrial lead malpositioned).
So off came my street clothes and, once again, on went that surgical garment – one that surely needs some re-design and logical thought directed at it.
But, once again, with a surgical schedule full, could I be fitted in?
I was (possibly to make up for the previous failure).
Now, a glamorously dressed lady surgeon from another hospital appeared. She read my notes, and retired to change into her surgeon’s kit.
I was not really looking forward to another session of pain and brutality. So I asked for the more liberal use of anaesthetic.
She started the procedure after the accompanying sterilisation of about everyone and everything. I expected a repeat blood-letting and brute force – except that it was not that at all.
The surgeon operated so gently and skilfully that, compared with the previous day’s attempt, it was almost painless. She re-attached the atrial wire to the heart.
The female touch in surgery is to be recommended.
Poor Margreet was the one who suffered throughout this medical saga, imagining the worst – the very worst – when the risks were actually quite small.
So, with almost a new heart, I was returned to my hospital room and to Margreet with the prospect of, once again, returning home the following day.
Final (satisfactory) tests were taken, and doctors released me. I was ready to start life again – with the restricted movement of one arm for several weeks.
To remind me not to raise my left arm, I devised a simple cord (string) loop, tied around my belt and hanging down into which to thread my lower arm. With the arm dangling through this loop, there was a restraining reminder whenever I started to raise it. This was a simple idea and, apparently, one not thought of before. And it must be the cheapest medical appliance ever to be used.
Never throughout the saga having felt ill, at times I felt a bit of a fraud. But doctors and nurses knew otherwise, and had saved me with their expertise.
One must admire hugely the Hammersmith Hospital’s staff, the National Health Service – and Margreet, whose supportive hand needed holding much more than mine.

Holland 2011

2012-01-03T11:43:00.002Z

To travel abroad is to suffer. However easy inspections and controls at airports and railway stations are, there will be queues, noisy children, neighbours with streaming colds and general mayhem. So the relief at having accomplished any international journey is considerable.
One of the many advantages of age is that one generally has an excuse for avoiding it.
After all, the pleasures of enjoying one’s own home environment without hassle are great. Foreign beds, foreign pillows, foreign coinage, foreign manners and foreign languages do not always add up to happiness.
However, I write on this trip to Holland in a positive mood.
Our train journey took us by Eurostar to Brussels (via the Channel Tunnel), and then on by train again to Amsterdam.
We passed through the wet and cold English countryside, while inside the carriage there was warmth and the sounds of pleasurable anticipation.
Space for luggage aboard Eurostar was at a premium as passengers had arrived with Christmas presents for those close to them abroad. So, although Margreet and I normally travel light on this occasion we had two suitcases and a haversack crammed full of beautifully-wrapped presents for the Dutch relations, who we seldom meet and who multiply quite quickly.
We emerged from the Tunnel to find that the weather was better in France – well, it was not raining, anyway. The open spaces were larger, and bleaker. I looked for signs of wildlife – any wildlife. I could not see even a pigeon – or any creature in the sky or on the ground. The French are very keen on “la Chasse”, so by Christmas time, most wild creatures in the countryside would have been eaten – with some sauce or other – and washed down in that part of France with, possibly, cider – certainly beer.
The large fields were either green with winter-sown grain, brown plough furrow or smooth seedbed. The furrow lines often contained unabsorbed rainwater and there were shallow ponds of water lying in fields.
Neither was there any sign of human life. The arable season was in obeisance. Humans were inside and warm – with warm insides – contrived by calvados, probably.
A small bonfire in the grey countryside lit up its small area of monotonous landscape.
Cleverly, concrete “ponds” had been, or were being constructed wherever water could be garnered -such as beside the lowest point of roads. The French and Belgians are wisely preparing for future water shortages.
Trees did not really fit the landscape, and looked a little unnatural, having been planted in regimented rows or in blocks.
Because of the delay in leaving London St Pancras, due to Christmas luggage blocking the carriage exits, we were to be late in reaching Brussels. As we had not booked train seats onward, missing our proposed connection did not affect us too much.
The lateness of our train enabled us to have a beer and a baguette in Brussels’ Midi Station before taking a rather seedy stopping train (called Inter City) through poor industrial suburbs, then to Antwerp. It was noticeable, in Belgium especially, that many house roofs had either water heating or electricity-making panels installed. They were ahead of the English.
So on to Holland and Amsterdam in particular.
How can a country that once almost ruled the seas and been about the most commercially prosperous nation in the western world, and one that produces some of the most delightful architecture anywhere, almost totally neglect the culinary arts?
Ask anyone to recommend an eating place and the answer will be a restaurant that is Indonesian, Thai, Italian, Spanish, Argentinean, Vietnamese, or any non-Dutch – but seldom Dutch. Possibly because of it, these “foreign” foods will have been given a strong Dutch (heavy and mixed up) slant.
But there are charming bars in Holland where one can drink wine or beer in congenial company. And there are “coffee Shops” where, I suppose, if you stood outside for a few minutes you would experience a “high” – at no cost.
Our hotel, the Wiechmann, on the Prinsengracht (No. 328), was all an Amsterdam hotel should be (described by Margreet as being like an old aunt’s well-appointed spare room), overlooking a complex junction of two canals, four roads and two bridges. Its breakfast room must have been one of the most interesting hotel dining rooms in Amsterdam. One sat inside, so close to pedestrians, cyclists, and cars, that it seemed almost possible to touch them. And the vistas were a delight to the eye.
There was a fine bar (a Brown Café) near to our hotel (the Eland Bar, where the Elandsgracht joins Prinsengracht), and a supermarket, wine merchant and cheese emporium. But where might we eat?
We went to a recommended Vietnamese restaurant across from the bar, in the Jordaan. But the food there was disappointing and expensive. So next we tried another recommended place – Italian (La Festa). It was bleak and almost empty when we looked through its window. But we took a chance. They offered carafe wine, and by the time we had started on our excellent mixed hors d’oeuvre, the place filled to bursting point. We ate very well there. Our last “restaurant” was our hotel room, where we dined well on bread, sausage, white goats’ cheese and excellent red wine. Picnic meals like that are hard to beat.
In between our evening meals we were entertained by Margreet’s family. The first was by one brother and his wife (Bert and Henny) who arranged for their part of the family to meet in a splendid, Edwardian 1st class waiting/dining room beside a Centraal Station platform (2b), then to cross the IJ River to a pleasant café (de Pont).
There were 15 of us guests who took the free ferry (destination Buiksloterweg) across the IJ, giving way to a long fuel barge as we did so. Café de Pont, where the ferry docked, was spacious, clean, and ideal for a family meeting. We drank wine, amid much fun noise and friendship, and ate steamed mackerel flesh on bread with salad. The children were charming, enjoyed opening their Christmas presents, and were well behaved.
On the next day we took a 20-minute train journey to Hilversum to meet Margreet’s other brother and family. It being Christmas Day made no difference to the railway schedules in Holland. At Dick and Reina’s modern house, that was full of art (including some of mine), we sat down firstly to individual plates of 8 cheeses with wine. Then, several hours later, we sat at another table for an imaginative repast that included venison with a sweet raspberry/strawberry sauce. The wine was excellent. Here, other children opened presents, behaved well, and were a delight.
Margreet’s brother, Dick Klees, was an original pirate broadcaster on a ship (Radio Veronica) outside territorial Dutch waters in the 1960s. So, being still a broadcaster, he is very much au fait with electronics. So we enjoyed his very professionally produced films on wide-screen television. In the past one was shown still photographs, then slides, then primitive film, now an exemplary presentation such as this one.
Another treat in Hilversum is to see Dudoc’s 1930s Town Hall. This magnificent example of Art Deco architecture is surely one of the greatest anywhere. Its enormous and simple block shapes of pale yellow bricks with deep-cut pointing are designed to form light and shadow to huge advantage in almost all weather conditions.
I notice that when I travel away from England I write about plumbing and its related matters.
This time it is about the bath and a person’s ability to get out of it.
The bath in our hotel was large and the hot water almost at boiling point. All seemed well.
But there were no handholds to help one get out. I had to have help, and then Margreet had to have help as well.
At least, many foreign baths have a handle to help – even though this handle is usually badly placed for comfort and success. This one had no handle at all.
But if one stood upright to have a shower, a handle was supplied – when it was not necessary.
I chose to have a bath and call for help when wanted.
Then I noticed that our bath towels were fairly long. So I asked Margreet to thread my bath towel through the shower handle.
With it doubled up I was able to reach it, to pull myself up, and then get out of the bath. Margreet was then able to do the same.
Do foreign plumbers ever have baths – or even think about how people can get out of them?
We had a day to ourselves for wandering and shopping, eating bitterballen at famous Hoppe and watching skaters in the Leidseplein, where, although the weather was warm, stalls were selling those Dutch batter delicacies of winter - oliebollen and proffertjes.
In the evening we watched the BBC programme concerning a purported portrait of Jane Austen. I had taken part in it to tell of the Gallerie de Seine and its owner, Anna de Goguel. But for the completed film they were not interested in her or the gallery, so my efforts were in vain. We found the programme to be extremely boring. There was no story and no conclusion.
Then it was time to return to England, firstly in a train to Brussels that was so crowded that even to get to the WC would have been impossible, and then to the Eurostar check-in at Brussels Midi Station.
At Security, we not only had to queue for a long time, but on passing through the metal detector several times – as I had forgotten to divest myself of various small items, I was asked to take off the belt holding up my trousers. So there I was, with several other men, trying to master plastic boxes of our metal bits and pieces with our trousers falling down.
Then came the rush, the cut and thrust, then the obvious delay as the security precautions had taken so much time. This could have been avoided had we all been allowed to pass through the checking procedures earlier.
Be that as it may, we were on our way home – with trousers secured.

.

Pheasant fried

2011-12-31T15:41:00.002Z

Throughout an English winter, oven-ready pheasants are readily available in the markets or butchers’ shops. And because the birds are shot in great numbers (sometimes, we are told, even buried during a glut) pheasant meat is very reasonably priced.
Pheasants mainly consist of breast meat, with a little on the thighs and a worthless, tendony bit on the lower leg.
So cut off the breasts with a sharp knife (keeping the skin on if you feel like it) and pare away any upper leg meat.
Now hold the breasts between thumb and fingers to locate and extract any shot that may have lodged in the flesh.
Cook or freeze the meat, and pressure-cook the rest to make game stock for soups or stews.
Keep the small leg pieces for adding to stews or pies, and deal with the breast meat in the following way.

PHEASANT – FRIED

You will need:
One side of a pheasant’s breast for each person
Garlic (optional)
Olive oil
Butter
Flour
Shallots
Boiled potatoes
Pepper and salt
Watercress for presentation (optional)

Heat a good quantity of olive oil and butter in a frying pan. Add a little pressed garlic.
Coat the breasts well with pepper and salted flour.
Very gently fry the breasts in the oil/butter mixture for 10 minutes on each side. Set them aside.
In the remaining oil/butter fry 2 finely chopped shallots until just browning.
Add sliced boiled potatoes until just browning.
Add the cooked pheasant breasts.
Heat all through and serve, garnished with a few watercress fronds if there are any at hand.

Note: Should you be given feathered pheasants, slice through the skin down the peak of the breast and peel back the skin with its feathers attached. Now cut off the breasts for this dish and throw the rest away.

Perseverance, Application and Endurance

2011-12-15T17:45:00.001Z

In the post-war Klees household, in Holland, it was thought that the two boys should go to University and the two (pretty) girls get married.
My wife, Margreet, the younger of the two girls, took a job in the E.E.C., and then progressed to the Dutch Foreign Service. There she worked in the Agricultural Department at postings in Africa and Europe, recently retiring as Agricultural Adviser at their London Embassy.
Margreet’s strengths were in writing, reporting, communication, and being a charming hostess and wonderful with people.
But throughout her working career she felt that not having a University degree was a great omission. She enrolled with the Open University, studying Social Sciences and the Arts. Occasionally she took periods off from studying. Her degree course was done in her spare time during full and exacting employment with the Dutch Government. And it was done in a foreign language – English.
When she had enough credits, she was able to embark on her final thesis. The project was “Europe: Culture and Identities, Inclusion and Exclusion in a Contested Continent”. For this she chose the artists Chagall and Pascin, then Chagall and Miró.
The results are through, and she has gained the Degree that she should have acquired in her youth, and with flying colours.
As close witness to her application and perseverance, I am lost in admiration for her – and immensely proud.

Garden, late summer 2011

2011-11-26T16:48:00.000Z

Rain poured down in the summer, but pots on the ground still needed watering. And as nearly all my plants are in pots or plastic sacks, watering continued as usual.
Failures in the flower section have been few, with only impatiens failing after lots of spring and early summer colour. It seems that some disease or other has tackled them. So there may be a shortage of bedding plants next year.
I knew that pieris hates to be cut back severely, having once killed one with this treatment. But mine had to be cut back, which I did very gently. It should be all right in time. But it is angry with me.
Like treatment with my mahonia was accepted by the plant as a necessity.
An old pink fuchsia that was rather hidden by a new and very vigorous one, complained, and was given space and light. Its vigorous rival soars skyward and produces a profusion of red and purple flowers.
The two roses have fared well. Typhoon, as always, is unbeatable. And even the weaker Rev. P-R produced lots of flowers.
The camellia produced its column of springtime flowers, and a hydrangea and hibiscus, neither of which were particularly happy, were relegated to the dark passageway at the end of the garden. They have provided the required greenery, but have flowered reluctantly.
An agapanthus produced only one flower, so has been divided and re-potted for next year. But its blue flower head made the red pelargonium flowers around it seem more vibrant. Otherwise I might have scrapped it.
The pelargoniums mentioned, growing out of holes in a tall strawberry pot have been splendid, but I need to turn the pot every week to give the plants an equal amount of sunshine. Resting on top of the pot is a rustic bird bath, providing bath and drinking water for our birds.
To distribute water and nourishment to the pelargoniums in the strawberry pot, a plastic flower pot, through which I have drilled several well-positioned holes, has been sunk into the earth beneath the bird bath. This idea has been a success.
Hidcote lavender provided some flowers after over-severe pruning last winter. Its grey foliage has added a nice contrast to the greenery around it.
Near to this non-colour, cascade the scarlet flowers of Bolivian begonia, Firecracker. This has become one of our favourite plants. I will try to over-winter its corm, after failing to manage it before.
From the vegetable pots we harvested a good crop of Charlotte new potatoes. We will plant up another bucket of them next year in place of pink fir apple.
We have not come to a conclusion concerning the flavour and vigour of tomato varieties tried, but feel that after several experiments we will return to Gardener’s Delight and, perhaps, Moneymaker.
The spectacular success has been runner beans, grown over a constructed arbour of bamboos. We have had feasts of beans, harvesting them for the pot at only about 6” in length. Those beans missed among the foliage have grown too large for pleasant eating and have been allowed to grow for seed and beans. By regular cropping the beans have responded by desperately trying to form seed for their survival and have thus been very productive. We have even had enough to give to friends. Their added bonus has been that the many scarlet flowers have attracted bees, and helped to brighten up the garden.
The grape harvest was a strange one, with some bunches never ripening at all. But the quality of our first vinification of two gallons was with grapes in superb condition. The second harvest of one gallon included white and red grapes and will make a rather red rosé. So the quantity has been small, which means, usually, that the quality will be good. But we won’t know about the quality until we bottle and taste the wine just before Christmas.
Herbs have provided for our needs. And the asparagus tree (tied to a bamboo) gives frilly elegance to the garden.
Despite poor summer weather, our little garden has been a pleasure to the eye, and provided food for the kitchen.

Remembrance

2011-11-12T08:49:00.001Z

When we remember the dead of two World Wars, we should also remember those who survived and then died directly or indirectly of their wounds. My father was one of the latter. The following account I may have put on my blog in the past. If so, it is timely to repeat it.

MESOPOTAMIA

The following is about my father’s part in the First World War – more specifically, his part in the Mesopotamia (now Iraq) campaign, described in his letters home to his mother.
Freddy Page-Roberts’s family lived in the 18th century Rectory, Stratfieldsaye, where his father (the great rosarian) was vicar to the Duke of Wellington. Freddy went to Marlborough, thence to Wye Agricultural College and on to Egypt as an employee of the British Government (Egypt was a Protectorate) to irrigate land with Nile water for agricultural purposes. In 1914, when working on these projects, war with the Germans seemed inevitable. So he returned to England as a Territorial to join his regiment, the 1st/4th Hampshires (although he had played cricket for the neighbouring county of Berkshire). After training on Salisbury Plain he was commissioned and sent to join the Indian Army in India.
In 1915, when the British army was engaged with the German army in trench warfare in France, and the Turks, in league with the Germans, ruled Mesopotamia, it was thought that to protect the allies’ oil supplies in the Persian Gulf, and to rule the Mediterranean waves, a force should occupy just southern Iraq. The Indians, who were to provide the soldiers, on the other hand, had in mind to conquer a Mesopotamia that had historically been a veritable Garden of Eden, colonise it with mass emigration, and return it to its productive state. And a conquered Mesopotamia would be a distant protection of its borders. Anyhow, the army were to beat back the Turks in this sector, about the same time as armies were to strike the Turk in the Dardenelles (where the Black Sea is linked to the Mediterranean).
To gain this foothold in southern Mesopotamia, an expeditionary force (IEFD – Indian Expeditionary Force D) was dispatched from India with mainly Indian soldiers and British officers (of which my father, now Captain FW Page-Roberts (age 25), was one).
The campaign was to be run from both the Empire’s HQ in London and the government in India, who provided the troops. With this divergent command structure and of separate national interests there was bound to be confusion and trouble.
After general chaos, without proper maps or understanding the terrain (mostly mud, water, many extremely vivid mirages and mosquito-infested reeds (let alone it being very cold by night and scorchingly hot by day), it came as rather a surprise that after some difficult fighting the Turks retreated northwards. Danders were up. Advance was almost unstoppable. Generals needed victories and glory.
The Turks were one thing, the indigenous Arabs quite another. The Turks fought like seasoned soldiers and were clearly the enemy. The tribal Arabs, on the other hand, whose allegiances were needed by both sides, resented occupation by both, and took advantage of both. Their method of fighting was to skirmish with stealth, shoot accurately, grab, and run. They were much feared as thieves, even causing the soldiers to sleep on their rifles for fear of them being stolen.
So it came about that my father was part of a force detailed to advance up the River Euphrates to take the strategic town of Nasariyah (sometimes spelt as Nasariyeh). This was to protect the western flank of the proposed operations. Maps and charts were useless, local boats, commandeered and weighed down by armour and guns, drew more than the general depth of water, so were a burden. Thick reeds had to be pushed through, scorching heat caused sunburn, no mosquito nets were available, the marsh Arabs skirmished, killed and stole, not to mention the wily Turk who defended from well-constructed positions and then retired strategically.
It is during this part of the campaign that my father wrote two letters home to his mother.

Near N……. (Nasariyah)
July 21st 1915
Just had mail of June 13th.

My dearest Mother,
It is some time since I wrote, but no boat has gone down from here, so it doesn’t make any difference.
We’ve had a very strenuous time. We went to the advanced trenches about a week ago. We went up by boat at night, landed, and after sundry jobs, got into the trenches at 12. p.m. Next morning we got up at 3.30 a.m., and they started shelling us at 4.30 and we had five or six hours under pretty heavy fire. My Company lost 2 killed and 3 wounded. We were in a very bad spot, as the night before one of the barges got stuck in the mud, and had to be left. This of course drew the enemy’s fire, and we happened to be in direct line about 50 yards short. It really wasn’t at all pleasant, especially as the third shot killed two. I thought we were in for a pretty bad time. If they had had high explosives, we should have been blown to bits, so the gunners say. We can’t dig trenches here, as water is just below ground. Meanwhile the 24th had gone out in boats on the left flank with some mountain guns to attack some sand hills, and had an awful time, five out of 13 officers killed and a hundred and thirty casualties.
Turks much stronger than expected, and hoards of Arabs. As a matter of fact, we all but went on that expedition, and if we had been a little stronger we should have gone. We buried a man called Birkbeck of the 24th Pujalies. Ask the Knights if he is a relation of the Farnham ones. Next day was quieter, but dreadfully hot, and we had to stay in marching order with no shade and no breeze. (I got a touch of the sun). In the evening at eight, we relieved the 76th in the advanced trenches, 600 yards from the Turks. We were lucky, and not fired on, till we settled in and were digging hard to improve cover, then they let loose.
Next day. Stood to arms at 3.15 a.m. and then started absolute torture till 7.39 p.m. Couldn’t move, not a breeze, and awful heat. Time goes very slowly, and we had severe heat strokes, one died. We had to dig for water, which was beastly. At 8.30 we were relieved and went back under a pretty heavy fire: got back all right, sweating like anything.
Next day I was feeling pretty rotten, and had a bit of temp., so came down here (hospital) at night, and am getting on all right. It’s only really an ambulance, with no attendance, and no food arrangements, but we get tents (double fly ones). Today it’s been 110 in the tent, so you can imagine what it was like under one waterproof sheet.
We may not be undergoing the hardships of France, but I should like to get the people who say we are having a picnic here. And put them out in our trenches.
More reinforcements have come up, and one aeroplane at last, which says the Turks are retiring to another position.
Hope we shall soon do something.
Love to all,
Your loving Freddy.

The next letter is headed Nasihirah, and dated July 27th, 1915.

My dearest Mother,
At last we are at Nasihirah, after nearly five weeks hard work and beastly heat. I believe the Indian Mutiny is the only other time that operations have been undertaken in an Asiatic summer. I am very disappointed, as I did not take part in the charge that turned the Turks out of their trenches on one side of the river, being still on the sick list. Three of us who were in Hospital joined the Battalion the night before the show, but were sent with the half-fit men in reserve on a barge, so missed the great show of this war. It was very annoying, but we were not fit, and wouldn’t have been much use for 24 hours of solid work. We started the shelling about 5 a.m., and about 7.30 we (only 120 strong and 9 officers) and the 7th Gurkhas left our advanced trenches for the enemy, and had a very hot time of it, and came under very heavy shell and rifle fire, and had to wait a bit, three quarters of an hour, under a wall before getting on. Meanwhile an iron barge was taken up to the creek we had to cross, about 200 yards from the Turks with sappers and miners and one of our companies. They had a very rough time, and the barge got practically blown to pieces and eventually sank. These men got off and lined the creek, covering the advance, while the sappers made bridges. The creek was supposed to be five feet deep, but turned out to be only three and quite fordable. Two of that Company were killed and most hit.
The Battalion and the Gurkhas then advanced and crossed the creek, cheered by the sappers and miners, and rushed to the trenches, from which the Turks were beginning to bolt, and by the time we got there were in full flight. Only about 20 of us, and 40 Gurkhas were up at first and cleared them out, 500 of them.
The W. Kents on the other side had gone like anything, straight at the trenches, and took them, but with pretty bad casualties. There were about 5000 Turks, and we had about 3000 at the most, our reserves were never used. Besides this they had a very strongly fortified position and excellent trenches. We got about 500 prisoners, and killed about 700, and took 16 guns. Not so bad.
Our casualties were about 350 all told.
We had Officers: 1 killed, 1 died of wounds, 3 wounded. Men: 8 killed, 1 died of wounds and 31 wounded. 44 in total.
Barton, our Adj. from the 2nd Battalion was killed soon after the start. He was one of the very best, and only married last August to an awfully nice girl. He will be a great loss to the Battalion.
Paul Simmons, of Basingstoke, died in the afternoon, hit through the liver. He was quite conscious about five minutes before he died. He was also one of the best, and I am awfully sorry about both of them. The Colonel was wounded, and rather lucky, as it just missed his lung, Osborn in chest, poor old fat Parsons broken arm.
This took place on the 24th of July (1915). We and the un-fit men spent the morning on the barge, and had shells pitching around. In the afternoon I did what I could for the wounded, and saw about burying the dead. At night the barge was towed up to the enemy’s trenches, where the men were, and next evening we came on to Nasihirah, and bivouacked, everyone tired out. Next morning I took 60 men to the barracks on the opposite bank to attend the salute of 21 guns, and the unfurling of the Union Jack. It is still very hot, but we can get some fresh meat and vegetables here, which is a great blessing.
The General came last night, and said we had done, with the Gurkhas (both very weak, 300 about) what a whole Battalion should have done, and we had done quite as well as regulars, and said we might be sent to India to join the rest, and recuperate a bit. I hope we shall go, as we are only about 100 strong, and rather worn out, and have had a good show. We’ve just heard Turkish reinforcements are about seven hours march away, but it’s not verified yet: we ought to give them a pretty warm time if they come.
Haven’t had mails for ages. Many thanks for chocolate. It’s rather melted, but when we get to ice, it will be all right, It’s very nice to be going strong, but I do wish I had been in the charge. Only 4 officers got there. My Company had 13 casualties out of 40.
Yours,

Freddy.

Now comes a large gap when either letters did not arrive, or they were lost, I will fill in the rough details as I know them.
This next letter concerns the headlong push north up the Tigris toward Kut, where the advance army was besieged by the Turks. Later, in an attempt to raise this siege, my father would be badly wounded in the Battle of Hanna. The fighting now described was chaotic, partly due to the speedy advance outstripping the length of available telephone cable back to Headquarters, and an almost complete breakdown of communication between those in command on the battlefield.

Indian Expeditionary Force D
Jan 11th 1916

My dearest Mother,
I am still going strong, and as comfortable as can be expected under the circumstances. Have left Amarah by boat, on the 13th of December (did not see the New Year in) arrived at Ali Gharbi on 1st Jan. Joined up with D Coy (Hugh North etc) all quite fit.
We stayed there until the 6th and then had orders to march. We did a forced march to Calel (?) past part of the force that had gone on in front about 20 miles, and arrived in camp after dark, which made things very difficult. It rained in the night, which didn’t add to the comfort. We had seen shells bursting all morning and next day we went on again about five miles and caught up the first force. Waited for orders, crossed the bridge and advanced towards our right flank to represent heavy reinforcements. We came under rather heavy shrapnel which burst all round. Luckily we only had 5 casualties in my Company. We went on for about one and a half miles and then retired. Got into camp near river and then had orders to march at 9 p.m. to a point of concentration preparatory
to a night march round our right flank. We waited from 11 to 4.30 with no blankets. Bitterly cold. At 4.50 we started again and marched about 6 miles down stream, but eventually found no trace of Turks, and came back to the bridge.
Directly we got back we had to go out again to take up a position on our right flank. We again came under heavy shrapnel, which luckily burst too high. We then dug some good trenches. In the evening it rained and made the trenches perfectly beastly and cold. Next morning it was misty and damp and we found the Turks had gone in the night. About 1 p.m. we returned to bridgehead and thought we were going to advance but got orders to cross over and look after a hospital there. We crossed by boat but didn’t get off, and we slept in the saloon in some comfort and had the first wash and shave for about five days. Yesterday we crossed over again and came up river about 7 miles and joined up with the rest of the force. It took us from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. to do it as we had a lot of cow guns and carts to get along over a very bad road. Then we had to wait to 3 a.m. for our valises and men and blankets. There was a very heavy dew and it froze in the night, so it was pretty beastly. Good day today and I think we rest here for the present. The casualties were very heavy about four thousand five hundred on our side, some of the regiments just arrived got it very badly. At present we don’t know where the Turks have gone.
We’ve had no mail for some time now. Hope to get one soon.
Cheerio. Hope you’re all well. Freddy.

I.E.F. D
Jan 16th 1916
My dearest Mother,
Just a line as I hear mail goes out in about half an hour. There’s nothing much to say except that we are having rather an unpleasant time but no more casualties as yet. I think I last wrote about the 11th. We are not yet in Kut owing to the Turks putting up a very good show in the way of a rear guard action.
There was another scrap about 3 days ago, which just missed being a great success. We hovered about in reserve and on preparing for action advanced to find the wily Turk had gone. We had some very cold wet nights without bedding or covering of any sort. But I’m glad to say we are again at the river and water will give us a chance to get at our parent boat and tents.
The troops from France are beginning to find this not such a picnic as they thought, especially the little things like medical comforts which of course one can’t expect to be as good here, as there.
We had a service on the boat this morning.
We got a mail three days ago, which had been done a long time and dated Dec 7th (latest). While on treck it would be very nice to receive food and chocolate. Mess stores are not very plentiful.
All the officers except Foster are fit and well and full of life.
Glad to hear you’re all going strong. Please thank father for his letter. Love to all

Your loving Freddy.

Hospital, Basra.
Feb. 2nd 1916

My dearest Mother,
I’ afraid you haven’t had a regular supply of letters lately, but we have been wandering about all over the country, and I really haven’t had any letters between the 9th and 27th of December. One is somewhere up river and the other went down on the Persia. I hope Nan (?) Crane wasn’t on it.
I hope you got the telegram about me being hit all right. After being in reserve the lst two shows and only coming under shell fire, we were supporting the attack on 21st over an absolutely open piece of ground with a long way to go, and the poor old Regiment got cut about badly, all the officers except I were hit and about 90% of the men. A good many are missing as we got into their trenches but couldn’t stay there. Next day there was an armistice but a lot were not found.
I expect (SS Varela, Feb5) you saw the casualty list so I won’t write them all over again, but the Turks managed to pick out the very best of the bunch. All my friends in the Regiment are gone or else up in Kut and now the Colonel has gone. I don’t know about what will become of us. Absolutely the very best of the officers were killed or missing, and I’m afraid there’s not much hope for the missing.
Poor old Hugh was killed instantaneously which is better than it might have been.
I am very glad to hear you are going strong and had a successful operation at last. You seem to have been well looked after by all the doctors. I expect that by the time you get this you will be about again.
As to my wound, I got hit about 200 yards from their trenches high up on the left thigh and couloid (?) nerve. They potted at me all day but luckily didn’t get me again. I was hit about 8 am and lay out that day and night till about 3.30 next morning when some stretcher bearers luckily came along, and after a very adventurous journey (as it had been raining all the time and the place was a mass of mud and ditches full of water) I got to an ambulance about 7 am. I lay in the mud there after having some rum till about 10 am, and got onto a boat at about 12 pm and into some dry blankets.
On the 24th I got onto another boat going down stream, full of British casualties who made a beastly noise all night. Of course it rained and the water poured onto my bed. We dined on bully and biscuits most of the way down and eventually got to Basra on the 28th and into a bed in hospital and had a decent meal.
On Feb 3rd we got onto the hospital ship Varela and are now on our way to Bombay, thank goodness.
I think after 11 months of Mesopotamia one wants a bit of a change.
The bullet must have hit the bone but very luckily didn’t break it, but cut the nerves. And I can’t at present move my left foot or leg below the knee much.
I don’t know if it will be a long job or not. If I get any convalescent leave I shall try to get to Cashmere for a bit. I’m afraid there’s not much chance of getting to England.
The food on board is top hole and I’ve had the first decent meal since we arrived in this country 11 months ago. Quite a change after picnicking for so long, and very hard not to overeat.
They’ve got some nursing sisters out now from India at Basra which makes a lot of difference to the running of the hospital, as the orderlies are only picked up from regiments in the country. We have got a lot of men doing orderlies who’ve had practically no training. A few RAMC men did come with the troops from France.

Colaha Hospital. Bombay Feb 10th 1916
We arrived here last night after a very good trip with only one morning at all rough.
We got off Bombay Harbour about 11 am, took some time to get into docks and I eventually got into an ambulance at about 6.30. And so to the Hospital about 20 minutes run. It’s a very fine hospital on the sea, but unfortunately I can’t see out.
My ward is quite nice and high and airy. 18 beds, not all full.
The Major examined me this afternoon and says they’ll explore the nerve (sciatic) to see what’s wrong, and that I shall probably be sent to England as it will be rather a long job.
It will be top hole getting back for a bit.
I heard from Mrs. Bowker who is at Poona and of course very upset about the Colonel. I am sorry for her. I think she’s nursing at a Poona Hospital. If I do stay in India I hope I go there.
I can’t hear many details about my Company. A lot got down river before I got in, and are now all over India.
I believe I was reported killed in the Indian papers. I hope you got the wires I sent all right.
Well I hope I shall soon be home and find everyone fit.
Love to all.
Your loving Freddy

My father doesn’t mention the blood loss, pain, being left for dead among the dead, building a coffin of mud around him for protection and the rain filling this coffin with bloody water, twice falling off the stretcher on the bearer’s three and a half hour treck to an ambulance station, or the unsprung cart that then transported his wounded body to the river Tigris. But he was lucky to have escaped death at Hanna, where 3,600 of his comrades were killed.
He never really recovered from this dreadful experience, living his life as a barely successful chicken and mushroom farmer through the great depression, and with his foot held up by a spring connected to a collar around his leg.
Desperate for good health, he took the great elixir of the time discovered by Madame Curie – radium. This destroyed his blood, and he died in 1938, aged 48.

Plundered Roofs

2011-11-06T12:05:00.002Z

A house in our street that had been converted from garages sported downstairs door and window projections covered with lead sheeting. These protuberances broke up the otherwise dull façade, and the lead/grey rooflets added a mellow charm to the frontage.
This fine covering should have lasted for many a lifetime. But one morning, after some 15 or more years of the building’s life, the lead had gone – ripped off in the night by thieves.
The ragged bits of lead flashing remained attached to the walls, turning the building into an ugly mess – stripped of its charm.
The thieves were brave, as in front and around were occupied homes, all beneath street lights, where anyone witnessing the nocturnal event could have called the police.
The owner of the house then had the projections covered with slates and dark, quarry, ridge tiles. The result was adequate, but now rather clumsily heavy compared with the original lead.
In a remote way, and many years ago, I may have been party to such lead theft.
I was sculpting in lead, melting it on my kitchen stove and casting the poisonous liquid metal in home-made casts of plaster-coated wood.
In those days I lived in London’s dockland, well before its elevated development took place.
The correct way then, in that area of the East End, was to make it known in a now non-existent pub that was frequented by police and criminals, what commodity one wanted. As if by magic it soon arrived – to be paid for in cash, of course.
You did not ask questions about the origin of anything that came one’s way. For all I knew, my lead came from people like those who stole the lead here in Hammersmith.
When that lead was stolen not far down our street, I was made aware that over the porches of each of our six terraced houses was also lead covering, secured mostly by its weight and a few very inadequate nails.
So I went to the screw box and secured the lead roofing on my porch with four screws (now rusting and very visible) on each side. And I knocked in a few wide-headed galvanised nails in between – just to make sure.
A day or two ago I left my house shortly after 7 o’clock in the morning to collect the paper, and on returning was astounded to see that the lead on my neighbour’s porch roof had been ripped away in the night. Only the contorted flashing attached to the brickwork’s pointing remained.
The thieves had also tried to lever away my own lead covering, but to no avail.
I have spoken to others in our terrace, and some have now secured their porch roofing with screws.
What kind of thieves would risk judicial punishment by stealing such a small quantity of lead, right beneath a street light and with people around?
It was certainly a quiet job, as, on a still night, none of us heard a thing.

Dieppe Autumn 2011

2011-10-27T12:17:00.000+01:00

I have written a lot about Dieppe in this blog. I write once more because of the changes there since we last visited this delightful French port more than a year ago.
It is, as usual, our favourite “abroad” place for a few days of complete change, gastronomic delights (mainly fish) and a source for acquiring good wine at a reasonable price. The saving on our car-full of wine pays for our break. Could one ask for more?
I have pretty well squeezed everything I wanted from a few drawings on postcards made at the International Kite Festival there in 2008. These will appear, in bright pastel form, in A4 and A1 size, in due course. The only kite flying during our visit this time was in the shape of an octopus. It was of no interest to me as kites like it, and many other exotic ones, had already reached my canvasses.
My kites are compositions of shape and colour, set in simple landscape. I doubt if any would actually fly. But pictorial representation is not what I am about in art.
I had never noticed before, and certainly not remarked upon, that the ground floors of at least two large shops in Dieppe undulated. To shop there entailed walking gently up and down hill. Floors are usually flat.
Shops change in Dieppe with some regularity. Those that do are mostly clothes shops. Department stores, food and vegetable shops stay the same - as does the smaller twice-weekly market and the large one on Saturdays. A shop where we once bought wine equipment and Pro-Ven-Di soap (soap on a chromium stick, bolted to the wall above a basin) was closed. But we had already managed (in England) to buy that soap, from France, through the Internet.
We discovered this time that it is best to shop early at the large out-of-town supermarket. There are then assistants available to help, and empty wine boxes to use. “Early”, in Dieppe, is before 10 o’clock, when shops open. Around 9.30 appeared to be an ideal time to visit the supermarket, when shelves were being re-stocked and those empty wine boxes available. We need the boxes to make the best use of space when filling the back of our car – to the brim.
A film was being made at the yachting harbour quay. Just whether one of the car ferries was involved we did not discover. But it left the inner port, wandered around off-shore, and came back to moor all night and brightly lit where vessels generally offload sand and gravel for the building industry.
Margreet estimated that the cost of food and goods had risen by 30% in just over a year. But we know where we can still eat lunch splendidly and cheaply, with unlimited red wine and cider. We sit with workmen (no women there), which does give us a direct link with France and the French. I can usually make myself understood, but Margreet, with her command of languages, has to translate the replies to me.
For the first time we were short changed (£5) after eating at the popular Tout Va Bien brasserie, where the harbour stops and the main street starts. The brasserie was under new management. Margreet soon sorted that matter out. The waiter knew exactly what he had done.
A most horrible bronze sculpture, forming part of a roundabout outside the brasserie has been dispensed with. But it had been replaced by another that was almost as offensive.
Dog mess, always a hazard in Dieppe in the past, has been considerably reduced – thank havens. One can now look forward and upward when walking – well, most of the time.
But for me the greatest and most welcome change in Dieppe has been one of convenience. It is that having virtually abolished the pissoire in France, Dieppe, most sensibly, has re-installed them – two, one in the main square and market place, and another near to where fresh fish is sold from stalls by the yachting harbour. Hooray for good sense – and less pollution.
The car ferry is underused out of season, and makes the less than four hour crossing more pleasant. And queuing through the system does give one a chance to talk with strangers. One man supplied organic vegetables to major supermarkets, which is a multi million pound operation. And a motorcycle enthusiast’s BMW fell over in the Austrian Alps, which cost the manufacturer a great deal of money in lodgings, replacement and repair, as it was still under warranty.
He was about to take one of his old bikes on a rally of vintage machinery in northern Spain. We once travelled back by ship from there with the same group of enthusiasts. So we asked if he would give our regards to someone who helped us out with a starting problem. This man could hardly be missed as he rode a bike with his wife in the sidecar. But what was more unique was the fact that he had adapted the bike so that he could manage to ride it one-handed – having lost an arm in an accident.
By talking to people you can make an otherwise boring trip quite good fun.

Village Life

2011-10-17T15:09:00.000+01:00

I was born and lived my early years in an English country village. I was happy, despite the sibling difficulties that children are subjected to. There is a lot to be said for rural village life, which usually comes with appreciation of nature and fresh, home-produced food. But, by gosh, there are limitations to country village life.
These limitations are to do with class, snobbery, power, money, sociability and religion.
There is a strong element of “them” and “us” in country village life (I got into real trouble as a child by fishing for newts with village boys).
To fit in, you almost have to entertain and be entertained.
It soon becomes apparent on starting out in a village that there will be people with whom you “gel” and those with whom you don’t. But it is best to get on with every one if you can manage it, as gossip takes a major part in village life and you certainly don’t want enemies.
To be accepted takes time, and is best when not rushed. It was considered, when I was a boy, that it took 25 years to be properly accepted. So juggling with the social side of country living does take time. Be that as it may, for pleasure and ease of life you must fit in.
Weekenders, however they may try, are seldom a real part of village life. Their village is a weekend village. And everyone, except possibly themselves, knows it.
But they do provide impetus to village life, and often contribute to it in monetary terms.
If you are lucky, there is another kind of village life. It is town village life.
Before WW2 we had moved to London.
During that war there was little time for socialising. It was a time for survival. And it was a time that I knew only when on leave from my flying activities in the RAF, when entertainment meant night clubs, where one's bottle of spirits was marked and kept until your next visit (if you ever returned).
Since the war I have lived in London on several occasions.
The first was with young. And it was with them (like having dogs) that you meet up with people with whom you would not have done otherwise. So, living nearby to school and other parents makes you part of a town village and leads to friendships.
Or you may be very lucky and find yourself living in a town community where friendships are strong, and there is a residents association, and church.
Those who go to church have even stronger bonds in a village community, meeting each other on most Sundays with a meeting of minds.
But this religious bond in town, nowadays, is not nearly as strong as it was when I was a boy in the country, when everyone of standing – and some without – went to church, almost regardless of their beliefs.
The great advantage of village life in town is that you can be friendly and acknowledge every acquaintance in the street – friend or otherwise – and don’t have to entertain them, as you would almost have to have done in the country.
In my present town community there is an established form of getting together socially. It is 6 o’clock drinks. We offer, or are offered, wine and a “bite” or two (I now favour a cheese pancake, served hot and cut into small pieces). Start time is usually 6 or sometimes 6.30, and by 7.30, or 8 at the latest, we part for our evening meal. It is a time for talk in general, a little gossip perhaps, and an exchange of information concerning matters of neighbourhood interest. An hour or two is just enough – just the right time.
Yes, it’s the town village life for me – any day.

Travel. Age considerations and the internet

2011-10-05T21:46:00.000+01:00

When you are young you want to travel. It is part of one’s self-education. You are brave – indestructible. And having travelled, sometimes dangerously, you are able, in later life, to hold your own in the company of those who have also travelled.
When you have been to a lot of places on the globe and become older, travel becomes more taxing. There are currencies and languages to contend with, beds and pillows that are quite different from those that you are used to, and with creatures and insects that annoy.
Many, of all ages, go away from the UK for sunshine, for the feeling of wellbeing – on land, sea and sand. This is understandable travel.
We once went away for foreign food. Now those foods are available in markets or on the internet. All can be enjoyed in restaurants or prepared at home – and generally cheaper.
For years I have had lists of things to buy in other countries (mainly France or Holland) that have been unavailable at home. Now most of the items on my shopping lists are obtainable near to home, or are traceable.
And even before taking into account the cost of hotels and food abroad, there is the ever-increasing price of car, ship, air travel and insurance to consider.
We have taken holidays-at-home. These have been periods of time when we have been self-indulgent with our relaxing time, wine choice, sightseeing and interesting restaurants. We have enjoyed these breaks immensely. And our entertainment has been convenient to our home.
So why do we leave for a few days in Dieppe once or twice a year? We go for “change”. Moreover, we return with wine, the savings on which virtually pay for our holiday. Short journeys abroad can still be viable.
But now, with almost all our pleasures abroad obtainable here, and the shops and internet able to provide the things that we used to go abroad to buy, I’m beginning to wonder if it is not the better bet to take all our holidays-at-home instead. We then have our own bed to sleep in, exotic food ingredients available in shops and markets, restaurants of every description around the corner, and a wonderful choice of theatres and galleries at hand.
So is foreign travel nowadays really worth it? Or is it just that I’m getting old? I suspect the latter.

Wine Corks (probably again, as I go on about it)

2011-09-27T10:52:00.002+01:00

I do not like to write about wine nowadays. I’m just an ordinary punter again.
When I had written masses of articles and 14 books, mainly on wine and vines, and was tasting some 2,000 wines a year, I knew, more or less, what I was about – especially with lower cost wines.
When I did write on the subject, I hope that I made it well known that you can learn almost as much about a wine from the bottle corks as from the labels stuck to the outside. That is still true.
A lot of wine is bottled with nondescript cork brands so that the bottles can be labelled and sold as wines that dealers think will sell. This not only applies to “plonk” but to wines in the highest bracket – as I learned once at an upper class white Burgundy tasting.
This cork business was brought to my notice of late when wines from Italy, Spain and France, bought in a supermarket that exists here and elsewhere in Europe, bore the same marked plastic corks.
These wines tasted of their origin, so must have been shipped in bulk to Germany and bottled there with “etiquettes” (labels, etc.) stuck on that may have been shipped along with the wine.
At this same supermarket I bought a test bottle of a wine made near Barcelona that was so “original” and delicious that Margreet and I rushed back to buy more. But I was fooled. It, too, had gone from Spain to Germany to be bottled and labelled there – though it was none the worse for this treatment. The plastic cork, though, was different, being longer and unmarked. The bottling must have been a special one for a better wine. “Corks can speak”.
I am not in favour of plastic corks in any form, and, because of them, conscious of the decline of cork forests and those who work in the cork industry. So I would like to see real corks back in the place of plastic. However, screw-top bottle closures for minor wines, or even major ones, make sense. They are convenient, easy to open and close, and save time.
When I started to write on wine in the early 1980s, wine writers were recommending wine in the top price bracket. So I had the jump on them by writing on supermarket wine – then at under £2 a bottle.
Now I notice that newspaper-recommended wines are, once more, in the upper bracket price range – often astronomically so. You do not have to buy expensive wine to enjoy good wine.
Judicious selection when visiting France is still an excellent way of buying wine – but beware the offloading of unsuccessful wine at Channel ports.
It is now an especially good time to buy in France, with 2009 and 2010 examples on the shelves.
But if tasting a bottle of wine before buying more – look at the cork. It will tell you so much.

Cheese and garlic pancake for drinks

2011-09-16T15:18:00.000+01:00

Margaret Costa, the well-known cookery writer at the time, was coming to dinner and my then girl friend decided to make a gougère. It was not a success, being rather flat and solid. But our culinary guest loved the result. There must, I thought, be an easier and quicker way of making such a delicious failure. A taste-alike, quick-to-make equivalent was needed for times when people were invited for drinks on the spur of the moment. The following was the result. Everyone loves it - especially children. It is not just a Shrove Tuesday treat, but one to be enjoyed at any time of the year - especially with drinks. And as I am often asked for the recipe, here it is.

CHEESE AND GARLIC PANCAKE FOR DRINKS

You will need:
Self-raising flour
Baking powder
Salt and pepper
Turmeric (for colour and optional)
Chilli powder (optional)
An Egg
Dijon mustard
Milk
Cheddar cheese (or a stronger kind)
Olive oil
Garlic

Put plenty of olive oil into a frying pan. Into it press a clove or two of garlic, spreading it evenly around.. Heat up the pan until the garlic begins to turn colour. Turn off the heat.
Into a mixing bowl sieve 3 ½ heaped dessert spoons of self-raising flour, into which you have added salt, pepper, a level teaspoon of baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon of turmeric and 1/8 teaspoon of chilli powder.
Break a large egg so that its contents fall into a depression in the centre of the sifted flour. To it, add a good dollop of Dijon mustard.
Have ¼ pint of milk at the ready, as well as some grated Cheddar cheese.
Break the egg with a whisk and start to stir the egg and mustard from the centre outwards, adding the milk as you go. Keep stirring and beating until the batter is smooth and free of even the smallest lumps. Or I’m sure a blender would do the same job.
Now put maximum heat under the pan with its oil/garlic mix.
Add the grated Cheddar to your batter. Stir again.
Now pour in the mixture to coat the bottom of the pan evenly. The edges will just rise. Immediately reduce the heat to very low and wait until the bubbling mix begins to dry out on its upper surface. This will take about 20 to 25 minutes (depending on the heat and the pan),
It is now time to toss the pancake - or turn it over as best you can. Make sure the pancake is not stuck to the pan in any way. Shake the pan or use a spatula to be certain.
Tossed, with its brown and garlic side now uppermost, with the point of a knife cut small holes slits in the browned surface to allow steam to escape from within. For a moister interior, don’t bother.
Cooking will take about a further 10 minutes. Lift an edge to inspect the under side. When cooked and golden brown, turn off the heat and, if the guests have not yet arrived, allow the pancake to keep warm in the pan.
Turn the pancake on to a board. Cut it into small pieces.
With my frying pan, and with gas heat from a large ring at its lowest setting, the whole cooking process takes 30 - 35 minutes. So just over half an hour before guests arrive for drinks I start to cook the pancake.
If more convenient, the simple preparation can be accomplished hours before the pancake is needed. Then, note the time, add the liquid, whisk the mix, and cook as above.
It is a good idea to make quite a lot of the mixture if guests for a party will be arriving over the period of an hour or two. Then, as you leave the kitchen with the first hot pancake, add some more oil, garlic and mixture to the frying pan - and so on. The success of this delicious pancake will surprise you, and delight your guests. Children love it, too. But don’t tell the young about the garlic, as some don’t like the sound of it.
If children are present, get them to hand around these pancake squares. Reward them. Like dogs, if given a job to do, they (and you) will be happy.

*****

Wasps and Drains

2011-09-06T11:28:00.000+01:00

Jorgen, a grape-grower in our street, complained to me that wasps in large numbers were tackling his crop. Had I seen any nests?

Now, I’m rather adept at locating the homes of these little varmints, being given the task as a boy and when I worked on a farm. In those days Cyanide was the substance for destruction, which now seems incredible.

So I gave yet another look at gardens within sight of our own. There were no nests to be seen.

We were having 6 o’clock drinks in the garden of a partially sighted friend, Anne, in a nearby street, when Margreet, facing the garden, saw a lot of insect activity. It came from a wasp nest in the roof of the house extension. It was a huge nest, but unusual, inasmuch as there was no single entry and exit hole, but lots - all in between slates.

I volunteered to deal with the problem, returning when all the wasps had returned home for the night.

Nowadays, wasp killer comes as a white powder, and is easily applied from a plastic container.

So I climbed a ladder and squirted powder into the many cracks that I had seen used by the wasps.

The next day it rained in the early morning. Had my powder been effective?

In the light rain, all traces of the powder had been washed away. But there was not a wasp in sight. Sunny weather returned and I re-inspected the roof. The powder had been completely successful. Our district will at least be wasp-reduced for the remainder of the summer.

The rain that washed away my wasp-killing powder coincided with a blocked drain at the rear of our house. Something was preventing water from the roof, sink and washing machine from escaping to the main sewer. Where was this blockage? And what might it be? The use of caustic soda had no beneficial effect.

When our terrace of six houses was built in the 1830s there would have been no drainage. An alleyway was provided at the bottom of our gardens for night soil to be collected and dispensed with.

Later, a sewer was installed in the gardens, running the length of our terrace, which may have deposited the effluent in the nearby Thames. Then the Victorian sewer was built beneath the street outside. So now our waste liquid travels one way under our gardens at the rear and then turns right and right again to join the Victorian sewer to run back below and in front of our front doors. It is well-travelled sewage.

At one time the garden sewer for our houses became blocked, and we had to locate our inspection covers and open them - to view the overflowing liquid detritus before the blockage was dealt with and the drain cleared.

So when our sink water, etc. overflowed at the back of our house, the first thing to do was to see if there was, perhaps, another main blockage. But the pipes were seen to be clear when a retired doctor friend, Mike, at the end of the terrace, lifted the drain cover in his garden with the help of a sharp spade and lumps of wood.

So the blockage was local and belonging to our house.

Some water was extracted from the drain in a small jug. Then a flexible drain rod, borrowed from my sister June, was inserted into the drain, but proved to be ineffective.

Then Mike and I removed some flagstones in our garden to find and then lift off the cast-iron drain-inspection cover. The drain beneath was clear.

Therefore, somewhere between that sewer drain and the house was the blockage.

From where house drainpipes join the sewer, up the blocked pipe went the flexible drain rod for its full length, touching nothing. So the trouble must have been in the U-bend drain just outside the house.

There was only one thing to do. I rolled up my sleeve, lay on the wet and muddy earth and plunged my arm down the dark and caustic soda water to pull out handfuls of mostly white plaster – until, eureka, away flowed the murky liquid to where it should have gone in the first place. And it was bloody water, too, as I had somehow cut my hand in the operation.

We had had an extension made to the house 19 years before, when the plasterer must have thought that excess plaster would happily flush away if poured down this drain. It didn’t. But also it didn’t completely block the drain.

Gunge, over the years, must have been slowly building up on the plaster, now extracted and waiting in a pile nearby for disposal. But it won’t go back down the drain. That’s for sure.

LONDON IN A DAY FROM MAINLAND EUROPE

2011-08-22T17:46:00.000+01:00

I have written of my personally-recommended tour of London, and this has been welcomed by friends abroad. Now, with a day trip here from the continent so easy, and if booked early so reasonable, I have compiled a day tour for those in mainland Europe who live within easy reach of a Eurostar station. Here it is.

Arriving into St Pancras Station from the Eurostar platforms, turn right and then right again for the Piccadilly Line Underground. This you will find after almost leaving the station. Descend the escalator. Take the Westbound line.

Get off at Leicester Square Underground Station (7 minutes). Leave the station by Exit 2 that says to Leicester Square and Chinatown.

Turn left as you leave the station and pass by Newport Street to turn left into the alleyway called Newport Court. This leads to Newport Place (a square) which you leave at its top left corner to enter Gerrard Street beneath the Chinese arch. You are now in the heart of Chinatown.

Turn right into Macclesfield Street, passing de Hems Dutch pub, to cross Shaftesbury Avenue into Dean Street. You will come to Old Compton Street. Turn right and immediately on the left is Patisserie Valerie (25 minutes from Eurostar).

At Patisserie Valerie take coffee and relax to enjoy a mille feuille (custard-filled) or, for more substantial breakfast fare, eggs Benedict.

You are now in Soho.

Turn left as you leave the café, and then branch right into Moor Street (past rental bikes) to cross Cambridge Circus, bearing right into Charing Cross Road.

Pass Leicester Square Underground Station, from where you arrived, and Cranbourne Street (leading to Leicester Square and with the excellent wine bar, The Cork and Bottle, hidden away in a basement on the left).

Carry on down-hill to pass the National Portrait Gallery (free) to Trafalgar Square with St Martin’s in the Fields church on the left and the National Gallery on the right (free) (possibly to see the dog, about which I wrote recently in my blog). Nelson’s Column stands proudly in the middle of the square.

Turn left beside St Martin’s in the Fields church into Duncannon Street. Cross the Strand to the Charing Cross railway Station entrances, where you will turn left into the Strand and then almost immediately right into Villiers Street down-hill.

Walk down Villiers Street, passing Watergate Walk (through iron railings on the left), followed, also on the left, by imaginative Embankment Gardens, to pass through the Embankment Underground Station. Walk up the 42 steps to cross the Thames by pedestrian bridge toward the Festival Hall. This will give you a good view of London and the river. If not wanting to take a gondola trip around the “Eye”, this is a good point for return.

You will have seen the London Eye to the right. Walk to it.

To buy tickets enter a building, as directed, where you will have to queue (this took us 10 minutes in early August). In another 8 minutes you should be in a pod on your way aloft to see an overview of London. This trip around the wheel will take 32 minutes.

Now retrace your steps over the Thames to pass through Embankment Underground Station again and just a bit up Villiers Street, to turn right into Watergate Walk and down steps to enter Gordon’s Wine Bar through a hole in the wall. This is probably London’s oldest wine bar, with the house above it having been the abode at various times of Pepys, Kipling and Chesterton. Take a good look around the bar’s candle-lit subterranean interior before ordering cold dry sherry (from the bottle) (no beer) and some olives. This will be much needed refreshment, as you will have been on the go for some 2 ¾ hours.

Return to walk up Villiers Street, to cross the Strand again, then to take a quick left and right turn up Adelaide Street, with St Martin’s in the Fields church on your left.

Up the slope and almost directly in front of you is the rather small and insignificant Harp pub in Chandos Place. You are here for its English pub atmosphere, its English beer (Hophead recommended) and its splendid sausages in rolls. The information about the sausage fillings will be written up in chalk outside, and also inside on the wall to your right. Order your drink (it doesn’t have to be beer) and sausages. The latter will be brought to you. This is lunch. Try to find space on the ground floor where the action is, but there is more comfort in the duller part upstairs (near the Gents and Ladies).

Leaving the Harp doorway, turn left up Chandos Place toward Covent Garden, keeping to Chandos Place and then Maiden Lane, to pass Rules, London’s most English of restaurants. At the T- junction, turn left into Southampton Street with Covent Garden in front of you. Walk straight through, taking in the fun, the sights of humanity, the trinket stalls and street performers (having a break there if time permits). Continue into James Street to reach Covent Garden Underground Station.

From there take the eastern direction of the Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross/St Pancras – and Eurostar home.

Kingsford Smith and Co-Aviators

2011-08-12T11:04:00.002+01:00

In the record books and from details taken from Kingsford Smith’s logbooks is the following:

1931 (24 September –16 December) Australia-England. First all-Australian airmail flight to England. Avro Ten trimotor Southern Star (VH - UMG). Co-pilot, Scotty Allen: engineer, Wyndham Hewitt. Time: 17 days. Route: Sydney – Brisbane – Cloncurry – Camooweal – Darwin – Kupang – Surabaya – Alur Setar – Bangkok – Rangoon – Calcutta – Gaya – Allahabad – Jhodpur – Karachi – Jask – Bushire – Bagdad – Aleppo – Athens – Rome – Lyon – Le Touquet (beach) – London.

Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, as he became, was a pioneer Australian aviator. He was the first to fly across the Pacific Ocean, and in both directions, crossed the Tasman Sea, and made the first successful westbound crossing of the Atlantic by air, mostly in a Fokker Trimotor (Avro built them under licence in England) that he called “my old bus”.
These were the days when aeroplanes were “stringbags”, flown by pilots and navigators “by the seat of their pants”. They were flimsy aircraft, unreliable, often dangerous, and with no navigational aids. It was also a time of opening up international air routes.
Kingsford Smith, surprisingly for a long-distance aviator, was terrified by the fear of the sea after a near drowning accident as a boy. He was also prone to panic attacks in the air and mysterious illnesses before epic flights – thought later to possibly be alcohol related.
He was a much loved international hero, especially so in Australia where crowds of 200,000 or more greeted him after his exploits in the air by hoisting him shoulder high in admiration and awe.
So who were those other two record-breaking aviators? “Scotty” Allen was also a famous Australian pilot, flying as reserve pilot with Kingsford Smith and Wyndham Hewitt (chief engineer) in the famous Avro trimotor Southern Cross - all, on one occasion, flying to Keepang, Timor, to collect air mail from England from the City of Cairo aircraft that had crashed there – a headline-breaking newspaper story of the time.
My own special interest in these early aviation days was that as a boy I was mad about aeroplanes and flying. In April 1932, at the age of 7, Kingsford Smith, a year after the aforementioned Australia-England record flight, was about to fly myself, brother and sister around London from the newly-opened Croydon Aerodrome in his ‘plane. Unfortunately the tail skid broke and a wooden replacement failed. So another pilot flew us around London in a Klemm Bat instead.
Why should Kingsford Smith volunteer to pilot us around London? It was because Wyndham Hewitt, the engineer on that epic flight was my uncle and friend of the great Australian aviator.
Wyndham, sent to South Africa after some misdemeanour or other, was next heard of in Australia. He was generally in trouble concerning women, cars and money, having kept a mistress in London in his schooldays (but those are other stories not for this blog). However, Wyn was a brilliant mechanic, completely at home with engines and their workings. So to Kingsford Smith he was invaluable when aircraft motors were unreliable and, in record-breaking exploits, under considerable stress for duration and ever-changing climatic conditions.
On the record occasion mentioned, The Southern Star and its three occupants landed at Croydon in record time with the Christmas mail from Australia, to be greeted by Sir Sefton Brancker (director of civil aviation), a congratulatory telegram from King George V, and jubilant crowds - aviation then being a new frontier to conquer and of enormous interest generally.
Although heralded as an all-Australian record trip, Wyndham Hewitt was English, which accounts for his name not featuring greatly, other than in the record books. Also not mentioned was that the aircraft had hit the top of a telegraph pole when landing in Darwin, nearly killing Kingsford Smith “and his engineer”.
Wyndham went on to found a successful engineering company and to race cars, dying in his 90s an unliked person, his several wives having been couture models and his cars the fastest models.
Kingsford Smith died, aged 38, crashing into the sea that he feared so much off Burma in 1935. He was attempting yet another England-Australia record.
I am proud to be in some remote way connected to so great an aviator as Kingsford Smith – even though he never did fly me around London from Croydon in 1932 or land in our field at Silchester where we had laid out sheets to indicate wind direction.
The truth is that Kingsford Smith was notoriously unreliable, and interested mainly in flying (of which he was a complete master), wenching and drink. However, he charmed everyone with his radiant personality and with his splendid songs accompanied by a ukulele.
Throughout his life he wanted to break records and, to make money, establish airlines. But, for the latter, other than using his name to good effect, the humdrum life as an executive and airline pilot bored him – so most were doomed to failure.
It was flying records he wanted and, appropriately I suppose, it was an attempted record that ended his life.

Ship Shapes series

2011-07-21T12:21:00.001+01:00

Ship Shape series

2011-07-21T12:17:00.001+01:00

A Faithful Friend

2011-07-15T21:12:00.002+01:00

In 1657, Rembrandt’s pupil and close friend, Gerbrand van der Eeckhout, was commissioned to paint a group portrait of Four Officers of the Amsterdam Cooper’s and Wine-Rackers’ Guild. The four Amsterdam burghers sit at a table on which are important-looking books and a document with a round, red wax seal.
Three of these important men wear tall, wide-brimmed black hats, and except for the Master are dressed in black with broad, white collars. The Master, whose importance is accentuated by posing in front of a white background, also wears black clothing, but sports a white ruff – giving him a certain gravitas.
They are serious men, important and wealthy, secure in their positions of power in Holland’s Golden Age.
They are there to be recorded for posterity, and have succeeded in life. The proof of this success on the part of the artist and his sitters is that we are now able to admire the picture, hanging in room 22 of London’s National Gallery, in Trafalgar Square. But it is not the Officers that steal the show, it is a dog.
This small, long-legged creature with short ears sits at his master’s feet, the Master, in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. He has a small tail, is pale brown with areas of white, and is marked by a V-shaped white patch on his head.
Dogs are happy with a job to do, and this dog does it splendidly. His duty is to keep an eye on everyone who might upset his master in any way. So he watches you, trusting no one.
Stand in front of the painting, wherever you will, and his eyes are on you. Walk across in front of him and he will follow you with his attentive gaze. There is no escape from his beady eyes. He might well bite should you get too near.
So the rope around the painting is not for its safety, it is for yours.

A Lost Weathervane

2011-07-02T11:02:00.002+01:00

I wrote recently in this blog of a lost copper and wood 1962 sculpture, found with worm-eaten and rotten wood support sides in a neighbour’s garden. The piece has since been restored. Through that written account, another lost “sculpture” has surfaced. Let me explain.
In 1962, a completed studio house, that I designed and helped to build in downland north of Newbury in Berkshire, needed a weathervane. Clouds and weather conditions were once most important to me since my life would sometimes depend upon them when I flew aeroplanes in the war. I still take great interest in what happens in the sky.
So I designed and made this weathervane out of copper sheet, ironwork and balancing lead, to form the shape of a Reverend F. Page-Roberts rose.
Although I had done drawings of the house with its proposed weathervane, when I came to install it, the proportions were wrong. It was too large (2’ 10” x 4’ 9”).
So I took it down, and can not recall what happened to it, except that, due to its size, it was rather in the way.
A reader of my blog, Judy George, contacted me, having read my piece on a lost sculpture. The weathervane exists, and it is hers.
It seems that my then cottager neighbour, the charming Mrs Rampling, found the weathervane in a hedge and gave it to Bill and Judy George, who owned the house after Francis Bacon’s tenure there.
The weathervane no longer tells of the direction from which the wind blows, but hangs on a wall as decoration. It has found a home and a use. I am delighted.
I wonder: Are there any other sculpted pieces of mine hiding somewhere?

Suzanne Valadon

2011-06-25T10:13:00.002+01:00

It was not easy to be a woman, let alone a woman artist, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. But in France there were four great women painters who rightly rose to fame despite the obstacles in their path. They were Mary Cassatt (actually American), Marie Laurencin, Berthe Morisot, and Suzanne Valadon.

I have never been over enthusiastic about the first three, but Suzanne Valadon could draw as no one else – and I have loved her drawings from an early age.

Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in 1865) was the illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic sewing maid. And at that time illegitimacy was hardly acceptable (yet there must have been many such infants before the advent of modern contraception).

Suzanne was a self-sufficient tomboy, small, athletic and strong. She had no artistic background.

With a mother concentrating on survival in a hostile Paris, Suzanne had to live by her wits, with only a sympathetic grandmother to whom she could turn to in times of adversity.

Apprenticed as a seamstress, her first real employment was with a private circus, where she turned her hand to any needed task, graduating to become a circus performer. But, falling from a trapeze, she hurt her back and was unable to continue with circus life.

She was, however, by her late teens, very pretty and well fashioned. So, to become a model (mainly in the nude) for Montmartre artists beckoned. Moreover, she was able to hold a pose for long periods of time.

Posing for many artists, it was Puvis de Chavannes, then probably the most famous artist in France, who gave her regular employment. This provided her with temporary financial stability and the illuminating company of artists, their circle of friends, dealers and patrons.

Word soon spread of her ability, and lust for life. When she was not posing she drew, learning by observation.

When working for Degas, he chanced upon some of her drawings and was astounded by her decisive line and bold work, several examples of which he bought over the following years. He pinned some of her work to the wall in his studio and invited comment. This was most favourable, and by those who had no idea that the artist was unknown – and a woman. Degas promoted her interests and gave her instruction and advice.

Suzanne was a favourite model and companion, especially of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, appearing in many of their paintings.

In 1883, she had an illegitimate son – father unknown. At that time she adopted her professional name of Suzanne Valadon.

Mainly because her son being frail and in poor health, she contemplated marriage with a rich suitor, who asked her the name of the boy’s father. She told him that it was either Puvis de Chavannes or Renoir. “Two fine artists,” he replied, and they were married. In fact, throughout her life she never divulged the name of her son’s father. It could have been several, but possibly a drunken sailor who raped her.

With marriage she virtually gave up her artistic work, but it was not long before she was hankering for the freedom and abandonment of her previous bohemian life in Montmartre.

Her son was the painter Maurice Utrillo, given the name of Utrillo by a Spanish journalist of that name who “acknowledged” Maurice as his son.

Maurice became an extreme alcoholic, drug addict, rabble-rouser and mental case. He was a drain on Suzanne’s purse and patience throughout most of her life, drunkenly fighting, or incarcerated in either jail, institutions, or even behind bars in his own home.

But under Suzanne’s guidance, in an effort to give him stability in life, he became an innovative painter, establishing a style of depicting the streets and alleyways of Montmartre that were much copied - as they still are today.

Then Suzanne fell in love for the first time with her son’s artist and womaniser friend, André Utter. He was some 21 years her junior. They married, just before he went to war against the Germans in 1915.

After the Great War, Utter, who had recovered from a bullet wound in the chest, exhibited successfully with Suzanne, and with Suzanne and Utrillo.

Utrillo continued with his volatile, alcoholic life, often paying barmen with his paintings when his debts had not been settled by Suzanne.

As Utrillo’s work now became famous and of considerable value, these barmen found themselves with valuable works to sell. They naturally encouraged his alcoholism – which hardly needed encouragement.

Suzanne, meanwhile, was at last accepted as an artist of note by dealers, gallery owners, and by those who controlled salons of importance. But her successful personal and professional liaison with Utter lasted for barely 12 years before they drifted apart. However, during that often tempestuous marriage, both Utrillo and Valadon reached dizzy heights of fame and fortune, with Valadon notorious for her extreme generosity.

In 1938 Suzanne Valadon, recognised as a great artist, collapsed at her easel and died in hospital.

Utrillo outlived her, having married and given up his wayward life.

It has been possible to fake Utrillos ever since he painted his groundbreaking scenes of the streets, steps, and picturesque paths of Montmartre. On the other hand, no one, but no one, could recreate a drawing with the power and strength of line of a Suzanne Valadon.

A Sculpture's Life (so far)

2011-06-13T17:26:00.002+01:00

In 1962, I was having difficulty in returning to painting after a year-long, round-the –world voyage of drawing, followed by the building of a studio house in the country (later bought by Francis Bacon).

I just couldn’t get going again without the interest of artistic progression.

I then struck upon the idea of help by creating simple collages of card with stuck-on coloured paper, paper combined with paint, paint alone in the form of collage, and sculpture of painted copper on wood that was also closely related to the said collages.

And it worked. Interest and creativity returned and, incidentally, interest to others as well, as one of them sold at Christie’s in late 2010 to a collector who took down a Matisse to make room for it.

A small one of those sculptures in wood and painted copper I still own. It was exhibited in a cabinet at The Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, London, at the time of my successful show there of Aircraft Shadows.

My London neighbour, Wilma, recovered from a decline in her life, and decided to spruce up her house and to restore a back garden that had by then become a veritable jungle.

I looked out of a window to see what horticultural progress had been made. And there, beneath two prostrate builders’ ladders was one of my (7 ½” x 13”)1962 copper and wood sculptures. – a painted Uffington White Horse on a copper, olive/green downland setting with a cut-out painted figure.

I had completely forgotten about this particular sculpture, and could find no photograph, or a record of it in my files. How then was I to discover how it came to be next door and abandoned in the garden?

So, when my neighbour was standing outside her front door, I tackled her, telling of what I had seen and asking permission to photograph the piece.

Then, later that day, as Margreet was about to enter our house, the sculpture was given back to us as the neighbour was ridding herself of unnecessary clutter.

The shape and colour is as if it had never been exposed to the elements. But, for a decade or more, the woodwork had become delicious grub for many a hungry woodworm.

There is preservation and restoration to be done, with its patina of age hopefully retained (created in 1962 and restored by the artist in 2011). I relish the opportunity to do it.

It materialised that some time ago, when my neighbour broke her leg in the district of the Uffington White Horse, I had given the piece to her as a commemorative present.

So its title is now: Wilma and the Uffington White Horse.

Whether she will thank me for this description is problematical, as it clearly depicts the painted image of that famous downland white chalk horse, and the raised form in painted copper of a fulsome naked lady cavorting nearby over the historic grass.

A BREADMAKING DEVELOPMENT

2011-06-02T10:21:00.002+01:00

Simplicity is the key to happiness – in all aspects of life, electronics, cooking, art, and on it goes. With simplicity goes timesaving.

I cook as I breathe – always have done. And unless I have simplified the cooking of a dish down to its bare minimum of fuss, ingredients and time taken, I work on it – even if I think I can hardly improve on it.

Breadmaking is one of those dark arts that need to be brought into the light. After all, if you can eat a really good loaf at less than a third of the price of a bought, polystyrene-like object, why not make bread yourself, by hand – if you do not already have an expensive machine and use electricity to run it.

Every time I come to make bread, there will be a new slant on it – simplicity and time taken being the main variables.

So I write this after only one experiment because I am so pleased with what happened, and delighted with the result.

The basics are the same – 1 ½ kilos of bread flour, salt, a hint of turmeric (only for colour), sugar (I used to use honey but can taste no difference when using sugar), a dribble of olive oil (I don’t know why), some dried yeast, and 1 ½ pints of warm water.

Normally I make the mix, knead it, allow the dough to rise in a warm place (sometimes twice), knead again, divide it into three well-buttered bread tins (never letting the metal to go near water), wait for the dough to rise in the tins, then bake the result in a hot oven for 1/2 an hour, followed by another 1/2 an hour at a medium to low setting.

The dough-rising bit has, until this experiment, taken place on a small area that is of under-floor heated.

In winter this was ideal. But in summer the floor is cold and unsuitable. So where was I to find a warm place - in the oven, of course.

So, when kneading, I switched on the oven enough to warm it, divided the kneaded dough into three bread tins, and watched the dough rise to the top of the tins in the oven, checking and sometimes adjusting the warmth about every quarter of an hour. And there they were, ready to bake, with no fuss, no unnecessary movement of tins, and no trouble. The resulting bread was wonderful.

Actually, I make six loaves at a time, filling the oven, then freezing the bread that’s not wanted when it has cooled.

So to re-cap – for three loaves. Empty a 1 1/2 kilo bag of bread flour into a large bowl. Add some salt and a trace of turmeric. Stir it around.

Take a Pyrex pint glass measure. In it put a heaped teaspoon of sugar. Pour in boiling water to the half-pint mark. Melt the sugar. Add cold water up to the pint mark. Test it for blood-heat warmth. Stir in one and a half teaspoons of dried yeast.

Place this measuring jar of liquid in the centre of the flour in its bowl, and cover the surface of the yeasty liquid with a little of the surrounding flour.

In a while the yeast will react with the sugar and bubble up through the flour. Whisk it all together. A creamy foam will result.

Pour this yeast mixture into the flour, adding another half-pint of warmed water and a dribble of olive oil. Stir it together with a wooden spoon until the mixture forms into a rough ball that you can lift out and knead.

Knead the dough by using your fingers and the heel of your hands. The dough might be a little sticky to start with, but will firm up. Keep at it for about five minutes. This is a most satisfactory process.

Roll the dough with your hands into a sausage shape, divide into three, and put these into the buttered bread tins, scoring into the top of the dough from end to end with a knife.

Put the tins of dough into your warmed oven and proceed as directed above.

Tip out the baked loaves onto a wire mesh surface, allow the bread to cool, then eat one freshly baked and freeze the rest.

London bird life, spring 2011

2011-05-13T21:42:00.002+01:00

Those in other countries may see garden birds as food for the table, but the British (the Irish used to kill wrens) treasure them for their song, friendliness in the case of robins and sometimes blackbirds, and the charm and mobility they provide for our gardens.

Because we love them, we feed them. And, in return, they grace us with their presence.

I have owned gardens that were the habitat of many birds. Some of these birds one got to know, like the swallows that returned annually to a stable, flying in and out through a partly opened window. Their return each spring, as with those dapper little birds, the house martins, heralded the oncoming summer.

Of course there were villains, like the magpies that perched and waited to see a parent returning to its nest with food for young, pounced, and made off with a chick in its beak to tear it apart on a branch or chimney pot.

A sparrow hawk would wait atop a post and chase a blue tit through the thickest of undergrowth to catch its prey – and then tear out the feathers before consuming it. Eventually I asked it to leave – and it did.

My smallest garden is my present London one. And although the variety of birds that inhabit it are far fewer than in the country, it does have the advantage that our resident birds become known to us.

We have our villains in town, too. The magpies lie in wait. And once a great spotted woodpecker (rarely seen) robbed a robin’s nest box on our house of all its young. (Afterwards the robins unmade their nest, throwing all of it to the ground.)

A hen blackbird inhabited our garden and enjoyed our offerings of Cheddar for, perhaps, 15 years. She once managed to escape the clutches of a cat (probably James May’s Fusker, who, when alive, was a great predator of birds) and could barely walk with a useless leg and hardly fly with many feathers missing. But she was a survivor, always producing two broods nearby each spring. Her successor has yet to gain confidence in us.

Robins have nested near at hand – usually in the house robin box – each year, except this one. And a tame robin (trained with morsels of cheese) has always been our intimate friend, summer and winter. They have eaten from my hand or on my knee, and given visiting children and adults much astonishment and pleasure – but not this year. One has passed through a couple of times, looked us over, and gone on.

But the absence of a fiercely territorial robin has at least allowed a pair of great tits to live unmolested as they nested in a box on the house and brought up a family of young. And, at the same time, a blue tit pair has done the same in a box above the great tit family.

Our garden is a small one of several in a row, much enclosed by houses. So, it is not what one might call ideal bird territory. But a few birds have chosen it. And because their number is small, we are much closer to them than those people offering more generous amenities. In that respect we are lucky indeed.

A LITTLE ABOUT MY COUSIN FRED SCOTT

2011-05-08T17:07:00.002+01:00

The newspaper announcement of my cousin Fred Scott’s death was brief, and submitted by part of his family. It was headed: Freddy Scott (MC). There has since been an obituary in The Daily Telegraph (25 April 2011).

As a very junior officer, Fred landed in German-held Normandy (between Caen and the sea) on D-Day with his platoon in a Horsa glider.

The Germans, being an orderly race, had positioned anti-glider spikes in straight lines where he was to land.

His pilots were rank novices, so Fred, who knew about map-reading, directed them in. And noticing the spikes in straight lines, ordered a landing so that the wings of his glider broke off on the obstructions, leaving the fuselage and all inside, shaken but unscathed.

He went on to achieve his objectives, pushing through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany, gaining rank and the Military Cross for valour (presented by Field Marshall Montgomery) en route. He ended in preventing the Russians from entering Denmark, mainly, in his account, by out-drinking them in vodka.

There are two stories about Fred that always please me.

When selling tobacco in Malaya for the company for which he worked before the war, his eccentric wife, Millie, was left a fine collection of pearls by her wealthy family in America.

Unable to receive them in the tropics, those in charge of this fine legacy were instructed to send them to Harrods, in London, for temporary safekeeping.

When Fred and Millie returned to England, they went to collect the goodies.

When the box was opened, all were aghast to find that due to being in a safe and unworn for many years, all were dead. Fred said that they looked absolutely horrible.

Harrods bought the many diamond clasps – and one string of dead pearls, just to show unbelievers what can happen to pearls that are locked away and not worn.

The other story I pared right down to send to the “Lives Remembered” column of The Times, should an obituary appear in that newspaper. It reads:

My cousin, Major Fred Scott MC, walked into a recruiting office and joined the wartime army as a Private soldier. He was put in charge of men who had passed through Courts of Justice and as punishment been given the choice of the mines or the army.

Fred was unable to open his locker as he had lost the key. He was given his own piece of wire and instructed by one of his charges in the art of how to gain entry.

His father, a Brigadier, newly stationed in the district, arranged to see his son. The Adjutant and others were dismissed from the room. Fred and his father were alone.

“And what have you learned in the army, Fred?”

“I’ve learned how to pick locks, sir.”

“Then open up that gas meter.”

Half crowns and florins fell to the floor.

“Now pick up those coins and lock it up again.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” replied Fred. “I have only learned to unpick locks.”

London Garden Update, Spring 2011

2011-04-23T20:40:00.002+01:00

The great advantage of growing most things in pots on a flagstone surface is that it is possible to create a much re-shaped garden each year. And a quantity of bricks and building blocks enables you to raise or lower tubs of flowers and vegetable crops.

A not-too-successful feature last year was a focal-point pot, designed with side apertures for growing strawberries. For strawberries it was somewhat of a failure. For trailing geraniums it was a modest success. Now, for real geraniums (actually pelargoniums) I have higher hopes. Before, I have planted flowers in its open top. This is now capped with a rustic pottery birdbath – one that used to lie on the ground.

When this bath was on the flagstones, and partly shielded by pots of rocket, herbs and busy lizzies, the bathing birds were vulnerable to surprise cat attack. Now, at the cost of privacy, they can have an all-round view when bathing, to see if predators lurk to pounce.

Another good reason for positioning the bath high up on its brick-based strawberry pot as the centre point, is that the more vigorous bathers, like blackbirds, spray the water down on to growing plants around it, instead of the useless watering of flagstones.

The pelargoniums, bought as small plants, are now growing in the place of strawberries, though very young, look happy already. I will rotate the pot during the summer, to give all plants in its circumference a measure of sunshine (our garden only getting morning sun).

The other major change this year is that we are growing more runner beans, having discovered that when harvested at under 6” long they are the tastiest and tenderest of beans.

For them this year I have constructed a bamboo arbour. The beans will grow up 9 bamboos on a wall, then move south over the top of the bamboo arbour, which, because of its asymmetry, looks not unlike the strings of a grand piano. The beans will then be harvested from below.

The “piano” is supported on one side by the 9 wall bamboos, and on the other by 6 vertical bamboos (making it asymmetrical) that rise from sacks of soil in which tomatoes will be grown. These are still in pots, having been grown indoors from seed since March.

The pieris (always our ever-changing and spectacular plant) had become a bit straggly over the years. It has been pruned right back, leaving a few branches of yellow/green leaves in the hope that new bushy growth will spring from low down.

The same treatment has been meted out to the mahonia – for the same reason – hoping for new bushy growth to appear.

It has been somewhat of a winter of violence, as major grapevine rods have been dispensed with, and the apple and pear trees (both in pots) have been cut back severely.

So this season will be one of re-growth for several specimens. Tulips are no longer grown. There are more carrots. And there is one bucket-experiment of main crop potatoes (pink fir apple), besides the successful two of past years for new potatoes (charlotte).

My large wooden sculpture in the garden of lovers was found to be standing on hardwood slats that had rotted. These supports have been replaced by angle aluminium (sprayed brown).

Inspection beneath the sculpture revealed much hidden rot. A lot of this has been extracted, and the wood hardened and treated. It was mainly the heartwood that had rotted. I took out as much of this crumbling rotted wood as I could, sticking my arm up, roughly in the way that we see vets on television doing at the nether regions of cows.

(Delayed) travel blog to Dieppe in September 2010

2011-04-13T09:55:00.000+01:00

Do you mind travelling with us again?

I often think how nice it would be to ask people on a Channel crossing who they were and why they were crossing.

The majority of passengers are in pairs, looking, at this time of year when schools have started again, like grandparents in need of a break and a rest. The couples look very much alike.

An elderly bald-headed man in rust coloured sweater reads a paper with deep concentration. His female companion has hair that stands up like bristles on a broom.

Their food tray is bereft of anything edible. The plastic sandwich cover lies open and empty. Several little milk pots rest where they fell near to two empty cups.

A pen and two spectacle cases lie on the table next to a dog-eared copy of a book of crossword puzzles.

Beside these items lies a new novel that has been partly read by a person who does not respect a book’s binding. So some of its pages look as if they have seen better days, and the unread part remains pristine as if direct from the publishers.

A part filled plastic bottle of water stands next to an open handbag made of fake ostrich skin.

The French coast has appeared on the horizon, but they are unaware of it.

There must be a draught falling down inside a large, rain-spattered sheet of glass behind them because she has donned a pullover/cardigan to add warmth to the rough-knitted under garment of many colours. This multi-coloured under-top confection looks not unlike cotton waste, used by engineers to wipe away grease.

Where are they going? Who knows.

Looking down over a balcony to the deck beneath, two travellers have laid out sleeping bags on the floor. Arab-looking, they appear as if they might wake up from their slumbers and start a fire to heat mint tea. Perhaps they are on their way to Morocco. But they are not there for long. Stewards have told them to behave and sit down.

A mackintosh-clad granny talks to a young girl dressed in blue jeans, orange top and fake fur jacket. They could be going home to France. They, too, have a crossword book open. It might be in French.

As one peers around, people look rather drab. Where are those elegant English we sometimes see on their way to a farmhouse in the Dordogne or villa in Provence? We see none aboard, even those with cabins for the journey who appear just before landing to await orders to regain their cars deep below.

In Dieppe we only see the unstylish and the dull – all black and brown. Where is this much-vaunted French chic? I did query this state of affairs once on Paris, to be told that the good-looking Parisienne ladies are not seen abroad, but are ferried to their shopping expeditions and smart homes by chauffeurs in grand cars.

In this new France I miss the past pungent smell of yellow Gitanes cigarettes and corridor and restaurant WCs, where one stood feet apart and hoped that nothing would drop into the large hole beneath and be lost to those famous French sewers.

BUT, fleas do still exist in France. Margreet was bitten almost as soon as we set foot in Dieppe.

We rather pride ourselves on locating good food in France at a reasonable price. We returned first to a favourite restaurant at the side of the yachting marina. But the waitress there had turned surly. There was none of the usual smiling service. How sad. The staff were angry with each other. And it showed. Of course, this attitude was reflected in their service. It rather spoiled our meal. But if one restaurant is crossed off our list, another is sure to appear to take its place. And there remains our favourite – and the cheapest – where we eat lunch early with scrubbed-up workmen. The meal consists of four courses and unlimited red wine and cider - for just over £10 a head. This shed-like eating place is in the bleak badlands of Dieppe, where the docks are sterile with only a pile of coal and some wind generator blades to hint of commerce.

But change does take place. A favourite restaurant of old was being taken over by new owners after many years of a lovely couple providing us with real French café/restaurant food. It will not be the same place without them, and being a little out of the way I don’t expect we will even give it a trial.

We chose to visit Dieppe this time just after the Retro festival of old cars, and before the International Kite Festival. Both are great fun but it is sometimes difficult to get a room during the festivities, and the port is crowded.

After many years (probably 60 for me) of staying in a room overlooking the town, we have now upgraded to one that overlooks the sea and any festival that is positioned on the enormous grass-covered plage. Because it is generally windy in Dieppe, there are usually kites flying between us and the sea. Moreover, on this occasion there was the added bonus sight from our panoramic windows of over a hundred geese flying south – in a rather ragged formation. And there were four late-migrating swallows jagging past our window – also going south. To the west the sun sets over the sea, creating glorious patterns and colours in the sky as it sinks below the horizon. When the sky is overcast, the colour of the sea is yellow near to the stony shore, changing to pale green, and then blue on the horizon. Sometimes all or some of this panorama disappears behind the rain from storm clouds. When we have eaten too much lunch we may have an evening picnic in our room, now with a fascinating and changing land and seascape as a backdrop.

For choice of restaurant food, I always pick at least one plateful of fruits de mer (mixed shellfish, cooked and raw), and being in a port famous for its fish, a fish of the day. Preferring carralet (plaice), I tried sea bream this time, but found it to have too many bones. Margreet often chooses steak, which, true to French custom, is tasty but chewy. We did once select an expensive wine, but the carafe white and red is always adequate. At least no one says “enjoy” when food is delivered to the table.

One of the main reasons for our short holiday trips across the Channel is to stock up on wine for home consumption. Whereas costs of most things in France escalate (and to worry about it would spoil a holiday break), wine is still splendid value. We buy a selection for £2.50 or less per bottle at one supermarket and even cheaper wine at another. To this we add some Normandy cider to feed the cider vinegar jar at home, and a selection of olive oil, though French oil is hard to come by.

On our last day, with little room left in the car, we bought freshly made Neufchâtel cheese from Olivier’s shop, and this time, some Pelure d’Oignon rosé from a supermarket at £1.50 a bottle. These items were squeezed in beneath the car’s seats.

It is seldom that we make a restaurant mistake. But before we left, and with time for lunch, we selected a place specialising in turbot. The fish was excellent, but the potatoes were rock hard. The chef had appeared late, we were told, but more probably drunk.

As we parked our car in readiness to leave France on the only ship now on the crossing, a van drew up alongside that was registered in England. I wanted to know about the possibility of renting a van for our wine-buying trips abroad. The renter of this van worked in England while his wife and son lived in Charante, in Cognac country, between Bordeaux and La Rochelle. The living there was much cheaper than in England, and having spent a lot of money doing up an old farmhouse he intended to retire to Charante and possibly return to England in old age.

This man had been a baker, so we talked about bread making, with him insisting that I knock down the dough to make the best bread. I mentioned that I never let water near to my bread tins, to which he replied that one should also never let water near to Yorkshire pudding tins either (something that I was unaware of).

He was on his way back having bought two wood-burning stoves in England for his French house, as they were much better and cheaper than in France. Surely, I queried, you don’t need heating so far south? I then learned that Charante is known for its extremes of temperature – freezing in winter and scorching in summer.

What, I asked, did he take back to France that is not possible to buy there. Baked beans and Cheddar cheese was the reply.

We return to England with wine and freshly-made Neufchatel cheese.

Robin training

2011-04-08T16:22:00.001+01:00

We had not seen our very tame and friendly robin for at least a month. She liked to sit with us, eat from our knees, completely trusting, fearless, and generally treating us like garden furniture.

When sitting in the garden and vinifying by stripping grapes from their stems into fermentation bins, she suddenly re-appeared, treating us as she always had. It was lovely to see her again, having worried that perhaps a cat might have caused her demise. She has not re-appeared.

In the meantime another robin has fancied himself as king of our territory. He is a wild fellow – dashingly active.

If this newcomer (“The Intruder”) is to become our “house” robin, he is to be trained – that is, to be trained to eat with us in our shed (which is not really a shed but a small, glazed, octagonal summerhouse).

Instruction is conducted in four stages.

For the first stage it must be established that Cheddar cheese is good grub for robins. So morsels are thrown out on to flagstones for the robin to enjoy without having to become too familiar with us.

For the second stage, a morsel is thrown out on to the flagstones and a couple of pieces placed, very visibly, on the sill of the shed door. This bait, when taken, shows the robin that it is safe to be near us.

Stage three involves putting bait on the sill and more on the shed’s carpeted floor. The robin will then know that it is completely safe to be under our feet (we have to be careful when standing up).

The final stage is to bait the floor as well as the top of three boxes of bird food that stand next to my knee.

When the robin flies in, directly or indirectly, to take food from the boxes, it has been trained.

Later, as entertainment for guests, and our own pleasure, the bird will take morsels from our knees – more readily when feeding young, when both parents seem to cast caution aside.

There is something about a wild bird standing on one’s knee that is very pleasing.

Pork Chops and Cauliflower

2011-03-28T17:03:00.001+01:00

I don’t know just how I came to make this dish, except that there was a cauliflower and two pork chops to be used up. Anyhow, the result was delicious, and the remaining cauliflower in its flavoured sauce just as good the following day (even without chops). It can be prepared well before wanted at the table, and will take half an hour to prepare and ¾ of an hour to complete. But one point I have discovered is that real pork chops – meat, fat and bone, are essential. Fat-free, lean, foreign, water-injected pork will produce a much inferior result.

PORK – Pork Chops and Cauliflower

You will need:

1 Cauliflower

Pork chops (one per person)

Ingredients for this (or any) white sauce - butter, plain flour, stock cube, Dijon mustard (optional), grated cheese (optional), pepper and salt, milk, or milk and water

Chilli powder (optional), turmeric (optional for extra colour)

Paprika (to sprinkle on top)

Depending on the thickness of the chops, cook them in a baking tin with a little oil in a hot oven for half an hour (for thick ones).

As you put them in the oven, rest a cauliflower in a little water in a saucepan and boil/steam it for 20 minutes. Make sure that the water does not boil away.

Now make a generous amount of white sauce. Do this in the normal way by melting a large lump of butter in a saucepan into which put 3 heaped dessert spoons of plain flour. Work the flour into the butter. Add to it 1 ½ pints of cold milk, or a mixture of milk and water. Whisk it all together to rid it of lumps, making sure to include the mixture at the angle where the sides of the pan meet the base (a metal spoon run around will draw this in). Keep whisking.

Add to this white sauce a dollop of Dijon mustard (if you have any at hand), a pinch of chilli powder (again, if you have any), a pinch of turmeric (if you have any and want a more glowing colour to the sauce), some grated cheese (optional, but for extra flavour), a stock cube of your choice, and plenty of salt and pepper. Keep whisking. Soon the sauce will start to bubble and be ready to use. Take it off the heat.

The cauliflower will be ready next (having been steam/boiled for 20 minutes). Strain it, using some of the water if you think the sauce needs a little thinning. Use a knife to cut up the drained cauliflower in its saucepan. Cut it into small pieces.

Add the white sauce to the chopped cauliflower and, when the chops are done, use the cauliflower/white sauce to cover and surround them in the baking tin. Sprinkle a little paprika over the top (for looks).

Finish cooking this dish right away with ¾ of an hour or more in a medium oven or, if kept until cold (even until the next day) at least an hour.

The above may sound complicated. But really all it says is this. Bake chops in the oven. Boil a cauliflower. Make a white sauce. Combine the lot. Cook.

Book Week

2011-03-13T11:55:00.002Z

It was quite by chance that we saw the tail of a television programme about the giving-away of books in Trafalgar Square. We understood from what we saw that it was the start of a week when new books were given away for free.

Only a few days before, we had closed down our own Mudlark Press as, with no further publicity, and no distribution, not to mention that several dockland books were a little out of date, orders had declined. In fact, it had come to the state when the nearly 100% increase in the cost of our P.O. Box number almost outweighed our annual income.

This left us with quite a few books that we had stored around the house – now taking up room. Here, surely, was just the chance to give away much of our “timeless” stock as encouragement for others to take pleasure in the printed word, and thus to indirectly help our beleaguered libraries.

I put half a dozen copies of “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World” in my bag before I walked a short distance down our road to buy the morning newspaper, and came back with the bag empty.

“It’s give-away-a-book-week,” I said in accosting anyone who might be conversant with our language.

All were most grateful and delighted with the book, and the idea behind it.

And that was only the start.

There were only a few refusals by people naturally suspicious of being offered something for nothing, and one or two who had too many books already and just wanted to chat.

But generally speaking, most were extremely happy and considered themselves to be very lucky.

I was sometimes asked if I was the author, and even asked to sign a few copies.

And for Margreet and I the whole process was a delight, especially to see people suddenly change from their workaday demeanour to a smiling one on accepting our gift.

Now we have more room in the house – and a somewhat glowing feeling inside.

Rissoles

2011-03-09T17:04:00.000Z

My memory for earlier times tells me that rissoles were once leftover food, and served mainly to children. Leftover food they may be, and now delicious for adults as well.

I have just made rissoles that were as excellent as many a recent dish.

They were constructed with beef that was fine when roast, a bit chewy when cold, and then, when put through the mincer and turned into rissoles – deliciously flavoursome with crisp and soft textures. And they are simple to make.

BEEF – ROAST BEEF RISSOLES

You will need:

Minced roast beef

Cold mashed potato

Pepper and salt

Amoy chilli sauce or another kind (a little)

Chopped coriander leaves (a few)

Flour

Olive oil

Mix the above ingredients together thoroughly. Then form rissoles with your hands. Dip the rissoles into flour, giving them a generous top and bottom coating of it.

Fry the rissoles slowly in olive oil until both sides are brown and crisp.

That’s it.

Publishing

2011-02-27T13:15:00.000Z

Despite a series of successful books published, no one in 1992 wanted to print my illustrated guide to London’s dockland. Publishers loved it, but thought that limited interest in a guide to such a parochial subject precluded financial success.

The photographs to illustrate the book (GUIDE TO A DOCKLAND OF CHANGE) were taken by me from the riverside road from Tower Bridge to Limehouse from 1949 – 1969. They were never taken with publication in mind, but were of black and white shapes as seen through the primitive viewfinders of several Baby Brownie cameras. They were to help with my vision as a painter. The words were my own from research, observation, and from talking to dockland people over that period of time.

The area was of a dockland very familiar to me as an artist, a supernumerary on coasters leaving from that part of the Thames, and, eventually, when I rebuilt a warehouse to live in at the head of Limekiln Dock in Limehouse.

Unable to interest publishers, there was only one option left – to publish the book myself.

We, that is my son Pete, my wife Margreet, and I, then had a lot to learn about the publishing trade, and much work to do.

Good distribution is a key to the successful publication of books. We were to do our own throughout the whole of the dockland area. Another key to success is to have a target readership. We had those living in dockland. Yet another essential is publicity. For this the editors of dockland newspapers and journals liked our book and quickly came in on our side with glowing reviews.

For the rest it was dealing with the mechanics of publishing, extensive leafleting and, for me, the writing of further books.

In all, we produced, wrote, illustrated, and sold 5 titles over a 3-year period.

Extensive leafleting bore fruit as Pete and I posted book information and prices through thousands of dockland letterboxes. In came the orders. We mailed the books, and sometimes delivered them by hand. Doing this resulted in many an adventure and considerable exhaustion and aching limbs, not to mention the odd dog bite. We made many a friend as we toiled, and even received Christmas cards from readers who felt they were part of our endeavour.

Each of our books was paid for and in profit within three months of publication – perhaps a record of some kind.

Then we had other important things to do. Dockland changed, the books became a bit dated, and sales tailed off. We didn’t mind at all.

It had been a splendid and rewarding period in all of our lives.

So, in February 2011, The Mudlark Press came to an end.

Penne, Ham and Garlic

2011-02-15T17:09:00.001Z

I had bought two slices of ham and was thinking about how to use them when a packet of penne dried pasta fell from a shelf in the kitchen. And as I had recently brought garlic back from France and found butter that I particularly liked, this simple dish was born (to me anyway, though I’m sure its like is universally enjoyed).

PENNE, HAM AND GARLIC

You will need:

Penne

Ham

Garlic

Butter

Salt

As the penne is boiling for its 20 minutes, cut the ham into small squares. Have a large clove of garlic ready in the press and a good lump of butter softening outside the refrigerator.

Strain the cooked penne and return it to the saucepan. Add the lump of butter and press in the garlic. Add the ham pieces and salt to taste. Stir until the butter has melted. Serve.

All this will have taken less than 30 minutes.

A medical emergency

2011-01-27T21:13:00.001Z

One can laugh at it all now, but as events unfolded it was a serious and frightening matter for all concerned.

We do not usually attend an annual get-together for members of our local Residents’ Association. This winter we did.

With our bought ticket came a drink, to be followed (much later on this evening) by small bites. With this in mind, we had enjoyed a bowl of soup beforehand, hoping for more substantial fare at the party.

My selection from the drinks on offer was a pint of Guinness which, with another half a pint lasted the one and a half hours that I stood, making the usual conversation that one does on such occasions.

Then, when enough was enough, I indicated to Margreet that perhaps we should make a move toward home.

So I passed her on my way to the door, where I suddenly felt a bit faint. So I sat down. She saw my plight and we left.

What I had not realised was, that standing for so long and with a comparatively empty stomach, and with one and a half pints of the black stuff inside, the blood in my body had drained downward, depriving my brain of enough of it to sustain normal life.

As the pub venue was near to our home, I had not bothered to wear a coat – even on this cold evening. The low temperature of outside air, after the very hot interior of the bar room, should have been bracing enough for full recovery.

It seems that I moved rather slowly toward home, where, having unlocked the house door with some difficulty and help, I fainted, collapsing from my considerable height to form a pile of limbs, set in a pool of blood from the head.

Margreet, in trying to keep me upright, fell on top of me. I had passed out, to a state of complete unawareness.

On regaining consciousness, I heard Margreet shout for help. She thought I was dying.

Neighbours rushed from their houses, and Margreet, beating on a nearby doctor’s door without success, left bloody stains on the paintwork in the process.

One neighbour, unknown to us as a doctor, recommended that I lie still until help, in the form of an ambulance, arrived.

Not only very cold as I lay uncovered on freezing flagstones, I was now a little damp in the lower regions.

The ambulance men helped me aboard their vehicle and tested me to decide on which hospital I should be taken to. Charing Cross was decided upon.

There, with equal courtesy, compassion and professionalism, I was subjected to a variety of tests for brain and lung function – and sewn up with stitches at the source of blood from my head.

Doctors recommended an overnight stay to check on brain damage. There was no sign of any. (After all, on crashing an aircraft in the war, my head had knocked two instruments out of the instrument panel without ill effect.)

Margreet collected me in the morning, and I continued life just as before, but with some aching joints, and awareness that at future “dos” I should be prepared to sit occasionally and to eat well beforehand.

Out of it all came the added awareness, if it was not already quite plain, that I have a wonderful wife, and that our National Health Service is, in an emergency, beyond reproach.

Except, one item did surprise me. When being allowed to depart from the hospital, a doctor wondered aloud what to record as the reason for my admission to Casualty. On reading from my hospital notes that I had consumed a pint and a half of Guinness, she decided that the reason for my trouble was alcohol.

So, when next you read a statistic that hospital casualty departments have admitted a certain large number of alcoholic cases for emergency treatment, please deduct one from the total.

Dumplings

2011-01-21T15:29:00.002Z

Dumplings are a joy to eat for most people. They are simplicity itself to make, economical, filling and nutritious. By adding them to a soup (or stew) you will enhance it and turn a modest dish into a meal. They are especially good in winter when soups and stews seem to be at their most welcome. Come in from cold blasts over land, river or sea to a dish with dumplings and you will soon be warmed right through. Children love them.

DUMPLINGS FOR SOUP (and stews)

You will need:

Flour (plain or self-raising)

Suet (that is, finely chopped or minced beef fat. Atora is a brand of it)

Salt and pepper

Herbal flavourings

Make your dumplings in the same way as suet crust pastry by combining twice the amount of flour, by weight or volume, to suet. Add some salt and pepper, stir together and then add cold water to form a stiff dough. Form this into balls, roughly the size of walnuts to golf balls, and drop them into the boiling soup or stew for 20 minutes to half an hour. They will then be ready to serve with the soup or stew. If you use self-raising flour the dumplings will be fluffier. With plain, they will take up less space and be chewier.

Consider putting lots of very small dumplings into soup. Two dessertspoons of flour to one of fat, with salt, when turned into dumpling mix with water will make 12 little dumplings. Two dessert spoons of flour to one of fat will make enough for two.

So good are dumplings that there will almost certainly be calls for more from a hungry family. So it is a good idea to add some more to the soup (or stew) as soon as you have served the first helping. Then, in 20 minutes or so, there will be more of them ready.

Plain dumplings may be best, but I favour them mixed with flavourings, like fresh or dried herbs, curry powder, chilli-con-carne powder, chopped onion, pressed garlic, English mustard, caraway seeds, cumin seeds, paprika, turmeric, chopped parsley, lemon or orange zest, and almost any dried herb or spice on your kitchen shelves. So here is an area in which to experiment. But start with plain ones.

Should you make too many for a meal, dumplings will heat up and be just as delicious when you want to eat the soup again.

Remember to boil up the soup every day – especially in warm weather. And keep adding to it any leftovers chopped-up, or the remains of stews or curries cut up with kitchen scissors. For extra liquid, add tea from the pot (not milked or sugared). And the addition of a stock cube may be necessary every so often.

Fusker lost

2011-01-13T17:28:00.001Z

I have written several blogs about James May’s cat, Fusker.

The first blog was about our fight – one that became a bloody and noisy conflict that sent me to hospital for stitches and injection, but made me “top cat”.

For all his villainy, Fusker is a rather special cat. When I see him I growl, and off he scampers. He has a memory.

But Fusker has gone missing, and some of us are upset about it.

Being a petrolhead’s cat he loves cars and vans, as well as pretty girls and houses where he can sneak in unobserved.

So where is he? James and Sarah have bill-posted the immediate district, put notices behind car windscreen wipers, and placed circulars in letter boxes – so far (after 5 days) to no avail.

He could be in a house where the owners have not noticed him, then locked up and gone away on holiday or business. He could be in a builder’s van anywhere, or he could have come across a hungry fox – and foxes do live in an abandoned garden next to mine.

In James’s notice there is a fine photograph of the cat and a description of his habits. Omitted, though, is a warning that appearing friendly, he can suddenly scratch and bite.

Has anyone seen him (black with front white paws and white nose and bib)?

Our district is the duller without him.

FUSKER DEAD

We now learn that people close to the main road nearby had found Fusker's body and disposed of it.

So poor Fusker died beneath the wheels of vehicles he loved so much.

If there's a cat heaven, he will be much respected there.

Sprouts

2011-01-13T16:09:00.002Z

First select your Brussels sprouts. They vary a lot in taste from the bland to the deliciously nutty. As far as I can see, you will get no indication of their taste by inspecting them on the supermarket shelf or market stall.

Sprouts are best consumed in the cold of winter My father would never eat them until the plants had experienced the first frost, though I have since eaten excellent sprouts before the arrival of cold weather. In the springtime they start to enlarge and become unpleasant to eat.

Look at the base of the sprouts. Freshly picked ones will have a clean, whitish base where they have been broken or cut from their parent stem. The longer they have been offered for sale, the darker and drier this base will become. Aim for small, tight sprouts with clean outer leaves. If the outer leaves are yellowing, do not buy them.

Trim off the base with a knife and peel off the outer leaves if they are bruised or dirty. The sprouts will then be ready to cook. Boil more than you need so that any remaining can be fried for a dish the next day - which is when they change taste and are just as delicious, if not more so.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS BOILED, WITH BUTTER OR OLIVE OIL, FRIED AND RAW

You will need:

Brussels sprouts

Salt and pepper

Butter and/or olive oil

Nutmeg (possibly)

Ginger root (possibly)

Garlic (essential)

Into salted boiling water throw the trimmed sprouts. Bring the water back to the boil and time the cooking for 5 minutes exactly – or 8 for large ones. They will then be cooked, firm and at their very best. Strain the cooked sprouts and return them to the pan so that any remaining water will evaporate over heat. Now add a good lump of butter or some olive oil with salt and pepper. Add a pressed garlic clove. Toss the sprouts around in this until coated. Serve immediately. Many believe that a grating of nutmeg is almost essential – I don’t..

If possible, retain enough sprouts to fry the following day – or start from scratch. Put the boiled and dried sprouts into a frying pan with a little olive oil, or oil and butter, with some pressed garlic. Add pepper and salt. Fry the sprouts until their outer leaves are brown and crisp, almost black, by which time the smell, with the added garlic, will be delicious. Sometimes I sprinkle over some peeled and finely chopped fresh ginger root, or boil and fry a couple of pieces of ginger root with the sprouts. But they are quite delicious enough without this adornment.

Another way to eat sprouts is to trim them, divide them in half and then slice the halves into shreds. Eat these raw with onion in mayonnaise or fry the shreds quickly in garlic, olive oil, pepper and salt.

Plumbing

2011-01-04T16:46:00.002Z

My feeling concerning houses is that if you look after them, they will look after you. This attitude has, throughout most of my life, helped to keep me solvent.

I have lived in my present place for over 21 years. And during that time I have used a pedestal wash basin in the bathroom.

In the course of general cleaning, and curiosity about plumbing (viewing crazy French plumbing has given me great pleasure), I noticed that behind the pedestal and rather hidden by pipes and being fairly inaccessible, is a U-bend that maintains water in the U part to prevent sewer smells from entering the house from the main drains. Baths, lavatories and basins, all have them.

But this particular one is different. The U is squashed together and upright – presumably to fit in and hide behind the pedestal.

And on top of this white plastic U-bend contraption is a small reservoir-looking shape, with a screw-down cap at its top.

I often wondered why it was there, but ignored it. And as it gave no trouble, presumably had a use, and was virtually unseen, I did not touch it except for a very occasional dusting of pipework.

It so happens that this pedestal basin was positioned by the original plumber at the opposite side of the bathroom from the main, downpipe drain. So the fall of the waste pipe is minimal, thus having a sluggish flow and not well scoured by fast running water. Moreover, I had added a bidet near to the basin to share this waste pipe.

This meant that every so often, when the basin and bidet became slow to drain, I used a plunger to speed things up a bit.

Well, after washing my hair in the basin early one morning, I noticed a wet patch on the carpet beneath the pedestal. And it was foaming with shampoo bubbles. So an investigation was necessary.

I found that wastewater was leaking out of this odd reservoir thing. And at the bottom of the contraption was a pin.

I pushed this up and out flowed water when the basin was emptying.

So, after some difficulty in unscrewing the cap at the top, I found a plunger inside, with a washer attached.

This flexible washer was then rubbed clear of lime scale and its seating cleaned. I then re-assembled the contraption.

Water still flowed out of the reservoir’s base, and now even from through the threads of the cap on top.

Thinking that perhaps the rubber of the washer had perished over time, I took the plunger with its washer to two suppliers of plumbers’ needs. No one had ever seen one before, or knew anything about it, except to suggest that it might have something to do with an air vent. So I said to one of these plumbing experts that I might have to seal it up with superglue. A good enough idea, he thought.

So, with the glue spread with difficulty from the tip of a cotton bud, down went the washer. I gave it time to set.

The next move was to fill the reservoir with a filler that sets like an impermeable rock. On went the cap, with the threads surrounded by plumber’s tape, and all was left overnight to bed in and set fast.

The result was that there were now no leaks and I hadn’t blocked the drains. The sink waste flowed, if a little more slowly.

Now the carpet has to dry out, watched by someone who rather likes to tackle such problems, but is slightly frightened by plumbing matters, but willing to “have a go” in extremis.

Perhaps I will even find out at some time why the U-bend was ever designed with this odd plunger device.

Mesopotamia

2010-12-17T16:34:00.000Z

The following is about my father’s part in the First World War – more specifically, his part in the Mesopotamia (now Iraq) campaign, described in his letters home to his mother.

Freddy Page-Roberts’s family lived in the 18th century Rectory, Stratfieldsaye, where his father (the great rosarian) was vicar to the Duke of Wellington. Freddy went to Marlborough, thence to Wye Agricultural College and on to Egypt as an employee of the British Government (Egypt was a Protectorate) to irrigate land with Nile water for agricultural purposes. In 1914, when working on these projects, war with the Germans seemed inevitable. So he returned to England as a Territorial to join his regiment, the 1st/4th Hampshires (although he had played cricket for the neighbouring county of Berkshire). After training on Salisbury Plain he was commissioned and sent to join the Indian Army in India.

In 1915, when the British army was engaged with the German army in trench warfare in France, and the Turks, in league with the Germans, ruled Mesopotamia, it was thought that to protect the allies’ oil supplies in the Persian Gulf, and to rule the Mediterranean waves, a force should occupy just southern Iraq. The Indians, who were to provide the soldiers, on the other hand, had in mind to conquer a Mesopotamia that had historically been a veritable Garden of Eden, colonise it with mass emigration, and return it to its productive state. And a conquered Mesopotamia would be a distant protection of its borders. Anyhow, the army were to beat back the Turks in this sector, about the same time as armies were to strike the Turk in the Dardenelles (where the Black Sea is linked to the Mediterranean).

To gain this foothold in southern Mesopotamia, an expeditionary force (IEFD – Indian Expeditionary Force D) was dispatched from India with mainly Indian soldiers and British officers (of which my father, now Captain FW Page-Roberts (age 25), was one).

The campaign was to be run from both the Empire’s HQ in London and the government in India, who provided the troops. With this divergent command structure and of separate national interests there was bound to be confusion and trouble.

After general chaos, without proper maps or understanding the terrain (mostly mud, water, many extremely vivid mirages and mosquito-infested reeds (let alone it being very cold by night and scorchingly hot by day), it came as rather a surprise that after some difficult fighting the Turks retreated northwards. Danders were up. Advance was almost unstoppable. Generals needed victories and glory.

The Turks were one thing, the indigenous Arabs quite another. The Turks fought like seasoned soldiers and were clearly the enemy. The tribal Arabs, on the other hand, whose allegiances were needed by both sides, resented occupation by both, and took advantage of both. Their method of fighting was to skirmish with stealth, shoot accurately, grab, and run. They were much feared as thieves, even causing the soldiers to sleep on their rifles for fear of them being stolen.

So it came about that my father was part of a force detailed to advance up the River Euphrates to take the strategic town of Nasariyah (sometimes spelt as Nasariyeh). This was to protect the western flank of the proposed operations. Maps and charts were useless, local boats, commandeered and weighed down by armour and guns, drew more than the general depth of water, so were a burden. Thick reeds had to be pushed through, scorching heat caused sunburn, no mosquito nets were available, the marsh Arabs skirmished, killed and stole, not to mention the wily Turk who defended from well-constructed positions and then retired strategically.

It is during this part of the campaign that my father wrote two letters home to his mother.

Near N……. (Nasariyah)

July 21st 1915

Just had mail of June 13th.

My dearest Mother,

It is some time since I wrote, but no boat has gone down from here, so it doesn’t make any difference.

We’ve had a very strenuous time. We went to the advanced trenches about a week ago. We went up by boat at night, landed, and after sundry jobs, got into the trenches at 12. p.m. Next morning we got up at 3.30 a.m., and they started shelling us at 4.30 and we had five or six hours under pretty heavy fire. My Company lost 2 killed and 3 wounded. We were in a very bad spot, as the night before one of the barges got stuck in the mud, and had to be left. This of course drew the enemy’s fire, and we happened to be in direct line about 50 yards short. It really wasn’t at all pleasant, especially as the third shot killed two. I thought we were in for a pretty bad time. If they had had high explosives, we should have been blown to bits, so the gunners say. We can’t dig trenches here, as water is just below ground. Meanwhile the 24th had gone out in boats on the left flank with some mountain guns to attack some sand hills, and had an awful time, five out of 13 officers killed and a hundred and thirty casualties.

Turks much stronger than expected, and hoards of Arabs. As a matter of fact, we all but went on that expedition, and if we had been a little stronger we should have gone. We buried a man called Birkbeck of the 24th Pujalies. Ask the Knights if he is a relation of the Farnham ones. Next day was quieter, but dreadfully hot, and we had to stay in marching order with no shade and no breeze. (I got a touch of the sun). In the evening at eight, we relieved the 76th in the advanced trenches, 600 yards from the Turks. We were lucky, and not fired on, till we settled in and were digging hard to improve cover, then they let loose.

Next day. Stood to arms at 3.15 a.m. and then started absolute torture till 7.39 p.m. Couldn’t move, not a breeze, and awful heat. Time goes very slowly, and we had severe heat strokes, one died. We had to dig for water, which was beastly. At 8.30 we were relieved and went back under a pretty heavy fire: got back all right, sweating like anything.

Next day I was feeling pretty rotten, and had a bit of temp., so came down here (hospital) at night, and am getting on all right. It’s only really an ambulance, with no attendance, and no food arrangements, but we get tents (double fly ones). Today it’s been 110 in the tent, so you can imagine what it was like under one waterproof sheet.

We may not be undergoing the hardships of France, but I should like to get the people who say we are having a picnic here. And put them out in our trenches.

More reinforcements have come up, and one aeroplane at last, which says the Turks are retiring to another position.

Hope we shall soon do something.

Love to all,

Your loving Freddy.

The next letter is headed Nasihirah, and dated July 27th, 1915.

My dearest Mother,

At last we are at Nasihirah, after nearly five weeks hard work and beastly heat. I believe the Indian Mutiny is the only other time that operations have been undertaken in an Asiatic summer. I am very disappointed, as I did not take part in the charge that turned the Turks out of their trenches on one side of the river, being still on the sick list. Three of us who were in Hospital joined the Battalion the night before the show, but were sent with the half-fit men in reserve on a barge, so missed the great show of this war. It was very annoying, but we were not fit, and wouldn’t have been much use for 24 hours of solid work. We started the shelling about 5 a.m., and about 7.30 we (only 120 strong and 9 officers) and the 7th Gurkhas left our advanced trenches for the enemy, and had a very hot time of it, and came under very heavy shell and rifle fire, and had to wait a bit, three quarters of an hour, under a wall before getting on. Meanwhile an iron barge was taken up to the creek we had to cross, about 200 yards from the Turks with sappers and miners and one of our companies. They had a very rough time, and the barge got practically blown to pieces and eventually sank. These men got off and lined the creek, covering the advance, while the sappers made bridges. The creek was supposed to be five feet deep, but turned out to be only three and quite fordable. Two of that Company were killed and most hit.

The Battalion and the Gurkhas then advanced and crossed the creek, cheered by the sappers and miners, and rushed to the trenches, from which the Turks were beginning to bolt, and by the time we got there were in full flight. Only about 20 of us, and 40 Gurkhas were up at first and cleared them out, 500 of them.

The W. Kents on the other side had gone like anything, straight at the trenches, and took them, but with pretty bad casualties. There were about 5000 Turks, and we had about 3000 at the most, our reserves were never used. Besides this they had a very strongly fortified position and excellent trenches. We got about 500 prisoners, and killed about 700, and took 16 guns. Not so bad.

Our casualties were about 350 all told.

We had Officers: 1 killed, 1 died of wounds, 3 wounded. Men: 8 killed, 1 died of wounds and 31 wounded. 44 in total.

Barton, our Adj. from the 2nd Battalion was killed soon after the start. He was one of the very best, and only married last August to an awfully nice girl. He will be a great loss to the Battalion.

Paul Simmons, of Basingstoke, died in the afternoon, hit through the liver. He was quite conscious about five minutes before he died. He was also one of the best, and I am awfully sorry about both of them. The Colonel was wounded, and rather lucky, as it just missed his lung, Osborn in chest, poor old fat Parsons broken arm.

This took place on the 24th of July (1915). We and the un-fit men spent the morning on the barge, and had shells pitching around. In the afternoon I did what I could for the wounded, and saw about burying the dead. At night the barge was towed up to the enemy’s trenches, where the men were, and next evening we came on to Nasihirah, and bivouacked, everyone tired out. Next morning I took 60 men to the barracks on the opposite bank to attend the salute of 21 guns, and the unfurling of the Union Jack. It is still very hot, but we can get some fresh meat and vegetables here, which is a great blessing.

The General came last night, and said we had done, with the Gurkhas (both very weak, 300 about) what a whole Battalion should have done, and we had done quite as well as regulars, and said we might be sent to India to join the rest, and recuperate a bit. I hope we shall go, as we are only about 100 strong, and rather worn out, and have had a good show. We’ve just heard Turkish reinforcements are about seven hours march away, but it’s not verified yet: we ought to give them a pretty warm time if they come.

Haven’t had mails for ages. Many thanks for chocolate. It’s rather melted, but when we get to ice, it will be all right, It’s very nice to be going strong, but I do wish I had been in the charge. Only 4 officers got there. My Company had 13 casualties out of 40.

Yours,

Freddy.

Now comes a large gap when either letters did not arrive, or they were lost, I will fill in the rough details as I know them.

This next letter concerns the headlong push north up the Tigris toward Kut, where the advance army was besieged by the Turks. Later, in an attempt to raise this siege, my father would be badly wounded in the Battle of Hanna. The fighting now described was chaotic, partly due to the speedy advance outstripping the length of available telephone cable back to Headquarters, and an almost complete breakdown of communication between those in command on the battlefield.

Indian Expeditionary Force D

Jan 11th 1916

My dearest Mother,

I am still going strong, and as comfortable as can be expected under the circumstances. Have left Amarah by boat, on the 13th of December (did not see the New Year in) arrived at Ali Gharbi on 1st Jan. Joined up with D Coy (Hugh North etc) all quite fit.

We stayed there until the 6th and then had orders to march. We did a forced march to Calel (?) past part of the force that had gone on in front about 20 miles, and arrived in camp after dark, which made things very difficult. It rained in the night, which didn’t add to the comfort. We had seen shells bursting all morning and next day we went on again about five miles and caught up the first force. Waited for orders, crossed the bridge and advanced towards our right flank to represent heavy reinforcements. We came under rather heavy shrapnel which burst all round. Luckily we only had 5 casualties in my Company. We went on for about one and a half miles and then retired. Got into camp near river and then had orders to march at 9 p.m. to a point of concentration preparatory

to a night march round our right flank. We waited from 11 to 4.30 with no blankets. Bitterly cold. At 4.50 we started again and marched about 6 miles down stream, but eventually found no trace of Turks, and came back to the bridge.

Directly we got back we had to go out again to take up a position on our right flank. We again came under heavy shrapnel, which luckily burst too high. We then dug some good trenches. In the evening it rained and made the trenches perfectly beastly and cold. Next morning it was misty and damp and we found the Turks had gone in the night. About 1 p.m. we returned to bridgehead and thought we were going to advance but got orders to cross over and look after a hospital there. We crossed by boat but didn’t get off, and we slept in the saloon in some comfort and had the first wash and shave for about five days. Yesterday we crossed over again and came up river about 7 miles and joined up with the rest of the force. It took us from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. to do it as we had a lot of cow guns and carts to get along over a very bad road. Then we had to wait to 3 a.m. for our valises and men and blankets. There was a very heavy dew and it froze in the night, so it was pretty beastly. Good day today and I think we rest here for the present. The casualties were very heavy about four thousand five hundred on our side, some of the regiments just arrived got it very badly. At present we don’t know where the Turks have gone.

We’ve had no mail for some time now. Hope to get one soon.

Cheerio. Hope you’re all well. Freddy.

I.E.F. D

Jan 16th 1916

My dearest Mother,

Just a line as I hear mail goes out in about half an hour. There’s nothing much to say except that we are having rather an unpleasant time but no more casualties as yet. I think I last wrote about the 11th. We are not yet in Kut owing to the Turks putting up a very good show in the way of a rear guard action.

There was another scrap about 3 days ago, which just missed being a great success. We hovered about in reserve and on preparing for action advanced to find the wily Turk had gone. We had some very cold wet nights without bedding or covering of any sort. But I’m glad to say we are again at the river and water will give us a chance to get at our parent boat and tents.

The troops from France are beginning to find this not such a picnic as they thought, especially the little things like medical comforts which of course one can’t expect to be as good here, as there.

We had a service on the boat this morning.

We got a mail three days ago, which had been done a long time and dated Dec 7th (latest). While on treck it would be very nice to receive food and chocolate. Mess stores are not very plentiful.

All the officers except Foster are fit and well and full of life.

Glad to hear you’re all going strong. Please thank father for his letter. Love to all

Your loving Freddy.

Hospital, Basra.

Feb. 2nd 1916

My dearest Mother,

I’ afraid you haven’t had a regular supply of letters lately, but we have been wandering about all over the country, and I really haven’t had any letters between the 9th and 27th of December. One is somewhere up river and the other went down on the Persia. I hope Nan (?) Crane wasn’t on it.

I hope you got the telegram about me being hit all right. After being in reserve the lst two shows and only coming under shell fire, we were supporting the attack on 21st over an absolutely open piece of ground with a long way to go, and the poor old Regiment got cut about badly, all the officers except I were hit and about 90% of the men. A good many are missing as we got into their trenches but couldn’t stay there. Next day there was an armistice but a lot were not found.

I expect (SS Varela, Feb5) you saw the casualty list so I won’t write them all over again, but the Turks managed to pick out the very best of the bunch. All my friends in the Regiment are gone or else up in Kut and now the Colonel has gone. I don’t know about what will become of us. Absolutely the very best of the officers were killed or missing, and I’m afraid there’s not much hope for the missing.

Poor old Hugh was killed instantaneously which is better than it might have been.

I am very glad to hear you are going strong and had a successful operation at last. You seem to have been well looked after by all the doctors. I expect that by the time you get this you will be about again.

As to my wound, I got hit about 200 yards from their trenches high up on the left thigh and couloid (?) nerve. They potted at me all day but luckily didn’t get me again. I was hit about 8 am and lay out that day and night till about 3.30 next morning when some stretcher bearers luckily came along, and after a very adventurous journey (as it had been raining all the time and the place was a mass of mud and ditches full of water) I got to an ambulance about 7 am. I lay in the mud there after having some rum till about 10 am, and got onto a boat at about 12 pm and into some dry blankets.

On the 24th I got onto another boat going down stream, full of British casualties who made a beastly noise all night. Of course it rained and the water poured onto my bed. We dined on bully and biscuits most of the way down and eventually got to Basra on the 28th and into a bed in hospital and had a decent meal.

On Feb 3rd we got onto the hospital ship Varela and are now on our way to Bombay, thank goodness.

I think after 11 months of Mesopotamia one wants a bit of a change.

The bullet must have hit the bone but very luckily didn’t break it, but cut the nerves. And I can’t at present move my left foot or leg below the knee much.

I don’t know if it will be a long job or not. If I get any convalescent leave I shall try to get to Cashmere for a bit. I’m afraid there’s not much chance of getting to England.

The food on board is top hole and I’ve had the first decent meal since we arrived in this country 11 months ago. Quite a change after picnicking for so long, and very hard not to overeat.

They’ve got some nursing sisters out now from India at Basra which makes a lot of difference to the running of the hospital, as the orderlies are only picked up from regiments in the country. We have got a lot of men doing orderlies who’ve had practically no training. A few RAMC men did come with the troops from France.

Colaha Hospital. Bombay Feb 10th 1916

We arrived here last night after a very good trip with only one morning at all rough.

We got off Bombay Harbour about 11 am, took some time to get into docks and I eventually got into an ambulance at about 6.30. And so to the Hospital about 20 minutes run. It’s a very fine hospital on the sea, but unfortunately I can’t see out.

My ward is quite nice and high and airy. 18 beds, not all full.

The Major examined me this afternoon and says they’ll explore the nerve (sciatic) to see what’s wrong, and that I shall probably be sent to England as it will be rather a long job.

It will be top hole getting back for a bit.

I heard from Mrs. Bowker who is at Poona and of course very upset about the Colonel. I am sorry for her. I think she’s nursing at a Poona Hospital. If I do stay in India I hope I go there.

I can’t hear many details about my Company. A lot got down river before I got in, and are now all over India.

I believe I was reported killed in the Indian papers. I hope you got the wires I sent all right.

Well I hope I shall soon be home and find everyone fit.

Love to all.

Your loving Freddy

My father doesn’t mention the blood loss, pain, being left for dead among the dead, building a coffin of mud around him for protection and the rain filling this coffin with bloody water, twice falling off the stretcher on the bearer’s three and a half hour treck to an ambulance station, or the unsprung cart that then transported his wounded body to the river Tigris. But he was lucky to have escaped death at Hanna, where 3,600 of his comrades were killed.

He never really recovered from this dreadful experience, living his life as a barely successful chicken and mushroom farmer through the great depression, and with his foot held up by a spring connected to a collar around his leg.

Desperate for good health, he took the great elixir of the time discovered by Madame Curie – radium. This destroyed his blood, and he died in 1938, aged 48.

Christie's at Chelsea

2010-10-28T12:15:00.002+01:00

Perhaps it was because of my past association and future connections with Christie’s auction house that I was invited to be one of their guests at an entertainment suite in Chelsea Football Ground.

I had not been to a match there since 1954 when painting a pair of 2’ x 4’ canvasses on board of the Shed, and of Sillet’s penalty goal (the former being sold at Christie’s in 2006 for £33,600 and the latter for £5 “wet from the easel”.

So the invitation was accepted eagerly, though poor Margreet was unable to go as she was recovering from a recent hip replacement operation.

The occasion would have been considerably more enjoyable had I not suffered from food poisoning the night before and had to retire six times during the night.

I took my proximity to the ground as an excuse to leave a reproduction of a self portrait (also 1954) at 430 Fulham Road. This had been done in my studio at the bombed-out house of that address by the football ground’s perimeter wall. I had rebuilt and restored it soon after the war. The place is now an infant school. So I thought it might be of interest to them, as in the background was a large mural of my interpretation of Rubens’s Peace and War. This might still be there behind wallpaper.

My fellow guests, all with a Christie’s connection, were young, smart, and personable.

We ate in the dining section of the suite, or rather I tried to, but did manage to enjoy a glass or two of a delightful white Burgundy.

It was an extreme coincidence that I found myself sitting in almost the exact spot from where I stood on a terrace to paint that 1954 picture of the Shed End (with the actual shed, then standing, but now long gone). And it was an even greater coincidence that on that very day, when Sillet scored the penalty goal in their Jubilee year, Chelsea were also playing Wolves.

Having only watched football on television since those early days, I was astonished to find the pitch appearing to be much smaller than expected and the players much larger.

The crowd, who bayed, chanted, encouraged and discouraged with much noise and animation, created quite a different atmosphere than “as seen on television”. But there was no commentator to give me the players’ names as they received or passed the ball, but then everyone there probably knew exactly who was who.

A young Italian lady sitting next to me became so excited by the action that she would have entered the fray at the drop of a (Chelsea) hat.

At half time we were offered coffee and cakes. And at full time (Chelsea 2, Wolves 0) there were lots of drinks available to dally over as we waited for the crowd to disperse.

By this time I was feeling particularly weak, so, thanking my host and bidding farewell to our friendly bunch, I left – to pass many policemen, at the ready for trouble, on my way to a bus stop.

The bus, chock full, made such slow progress that an elderly neighbour and I decided to walk the few miles back to Hammersmith. He knew the short cuts, being a steward for both Fulham and Chelsea football teams and often experiencing these after-the-match traffic jams. Travelling with supporters in the UK and Europe, he would seem to have been well suited for the job, being a scoutmaster (for keeping order), bowls player (for creating calm) and a model train enthusiast (for being one of the boys).

We shook hands having reached our destination (with traffic still deadlocked), and I reached home in a state of complete exhaustion.

But it had been a grand day out.

Real Lemonade

2010-09-25T16:20:00.002+01:00

In days of yore (actually the early 1930s when I was a boy) my family lived in the country. We were almost self-supporting during the depression. We had a chicken farm (all free range, obviously), so had eggs and fowls to eat. We grew our own vegetables and fruit, preserving the surplus in one way or another to feed us through the winter months.

We had no electricity, so no refrigeration. Food was kept in a larder on the north side of the house near to the kitchen. Home-made gas gave us light in the dark evenings. It all sounds a bit primitive by today’s standards. But, except for being poor, we children were very content with our lot.

Our parents entertained with dances on our sprung drawing room floor in winter and tennis on a grass court in summer where, if any of us three children could find a weed, we were rewarded.

My father, having been badly wounded in the ‘14-’18 war, was somewhat of a health freak (which in fact killed him when trying radium, Madame Curie’s new invention). So fruit featured in our diet quite often.

For liquid sustenance, our guests were offered home-made lemonade. And memorable it was, being simple to make and delicious to drink. I make it to this day – more in summer than in winter.

The ingredients for this family lemonade were lemons (they were not waxed then) brown sugar (then known as pieces) and water. It is best made as an essence, and nowadays kept in a bottle in the refrigerator, to be diluted with water (which came ice cold from a well in those days), sparkling water, or even bought fizzy lemonade. Rum, vodka or other spirit will also turn it into something quite delicious.

Take four unwaxed lemons of a decent size. Halve them, and squeeze out the juice. Place this juice, pips and roughage in a bowl.

Cut up each lemon half into about three pieces and add these to the bowl.

Now add (for a sharpish essence) a table spoon of brown sugar.

I then press it all down in the bowl with a potato masher before and after adding most of a kettle full of boiling water. This releases some oils from the skin.

Allow the contents of the bowl to cool and, with a large funnel and sieve, strain the lemonade essence into a bottle – clear, plastic, glass, juice or water bottle will do.

Refrigerate this concentrate and use it diluted to taste with ice and what you will.

You will be drinking something pure and delicious – and with not an E-number involved.

VEGETABLE GARDEN UPDATE - END OF SUMMER 2010

2010-09-18T17:23:00.000+01:00

If broad and climbing French beans were a bit of a disappointment, runner beans were a huge success. Since coming into fruition (if that’s the word), we have harvested a handful about every other day from some six plants grown in sacks of soil (sacks that had been useless for other vegetables). We have harvested the beans when still very young, before they formed stringy edges. We have eaten them either raw, or boiled for five minutes, dried in the saucepan, and then coated with melted butter, sea salt and garlic (an Argentinian garlic recommended for fish and salads). As an accompaniment to evening drinks in our garden or shed, the beans have been a delight. And searching for them among their foliage has also contributed to the start of the evenings’ pleasures.

Another delight obtained from these beans (Scarlet Runners) has been that their flowers have made a lovely addition to garden colour, and that their bright scarlet has attracted bees and bumblebees.

Next year I will construct a larger bamboo and string frame for them to spread over.

The tomato crop has been adequate, a crop that I think would have been larger had the plants not been partially shielded from the sun by runner beans.

The grape harvest was divided into two parts, with us going to Dieppe for a break in between. The result was 5 1/2 gallons of wine, one gallon of that being rosé. The sugar content of each harvest was around 15%. This was increased by the addition of sugar to make 22%. That will create just over 13% alcohol in the wine. The result of whether it has been a good vintage or not will be known shortly before Christmas when the bottling begins and the wine tasted.

From our “orchard” (one pear tree in a pot and an apple tree in a pot) we enjoyed some excellent fruit (and they looked nice, too). But a few pears were ruined for us, but not for a blue tit who acquired a taste for some when still unripe.

Summer background colour has been provided by our regulars of pelargoniums, impatiens, Bolivian begonias and roses (the Rev. P-R doing well for its age and weak vigour, and Typhoon spectacularly well – as always).

Our robins chose to nest elsewhere, but great tits brought up a family in our nest box.

Overall, it has been a good summer.

2010 Vintage

2010-09-02T10:53:00.002+01:00

There is something very satisfying about harvesting in late summer or autumn for winter consumption.

My son brought us damsons to turn into pulp and damson gin. My sister gave us apples and blackberries to be cooked down and then frozen for winter pies.

But our very own harvest, besides home-grown beans and tomatoes, has been our annual creating of wine from the vines in our small garden.

Ripening of grapes this year was a little uneven. So we harvested the ripest bunches of red Triomphe d’Alsace grapes on the 29th of August. Later we will vinify the later-to-ripen white grapes and the remaining bunches of Triomphe d’Alsace that will then be ready. Together these will be vinified to make rosé.

Two of us harvested five buckets of grapes, and de-stemmed them. Bunches of red grapes were stripped of their stems into two fermentation bins. The contents of the bins had sugar and yeast added, although the extra yeast was hardly necessary due to the bloom on the grape skins.

Fermentation started quickly and built up in vigour over three days.

It is necessary to keep forcing down the cap that rises to the surface during fermentation to prevent noxious moulds from forming on it. For the same reason, both inside and out of the bins have to be kept scrupulously clean.

Refusing to add sulphur to the wine (as more or less everyone else does) I rely on the alcohol produced as my preservative. So the higher alcohol content is contrived by the addition of a little more sugar than is normal.

Vinification takes place by ladling the fermenting must into a straining bag placed over a funnel in the demijohn. Some juice will run through the bag, and more after much squeezing and pummelling of the bag. Pips and skins are discarded, though in countries on the continent they might be turned into spirit.

There seems to have been a high proportion of pips and skins this year. So that five gallons of must produced only three and a half gallons of juice.

Because of the fear of bacterial contamination by not incorporating sulphur, I choose to strain the juice into the gallon demijohns when fermentation is still reasonably vigorous, hoping that nasties will not be able to invade the wine. This means that a certain amount of wine will issue forth from the gallon jars’ fermentation locks.

Then, when those locks have been changed regularly and washed clean, comes one of the joys of vinification. A regular stream of carbon dioxide bubbles plop forth from all the locks, making a noise rather like a chorus of croaking frogs. This lasts for as long as the yeast is turning sugar into alcohol. So the noise may continue when the demijohns are stored in the loft to be forgotten until shortly before Christmas. Then it is time to bottle the wine and see if 2010 has been a good year.

vinification St Peter's Grove

2010-09-02T10:49:00.001+01:00

vinification 2010

2010-09-02T10:44:00.001+01:00

2010-08-30

2010-08-30T10:33:00.000+01:00

2010-08-30

2010-08-30T10:32:00.000+01:00

summer 2010

2010-08-28T10:21:00.001+01:00

2010-08-22T21:15:00.000+01:00

VARIOUS INCIDENTS

Daily life is enlightened by a series of small incidents that are hardly worth mentioning. But that is what makes living so interesting. Perhaps I am about to “twitter” if I record a few.

We went to a funeral in deepest Hertfordshire where the grandchildren of the deceased, who lived for his garden, threw bouquets of flowers into the grave after the coffin had been lowered into it. It made a touching scene.
Afterwards we spoke to a lady, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, who was trying to hide a large sticking plaster on her forehead. She had been to hospital to have a cancerous melanoma cut away from above her eyebrow. When at home she discovered that they had removed a mosquito bite instead – with the melanoma still there.

There was a clattering outside our house at two o’clock in the morning. Official-looking, yellow-coated men were lifting drain covers and probing beneath them.
At eight o’clock the following morning, several policemen tried to gain entrance to a house. They shouted that they had a search warrant. It was not until they started to break down the door that entry was granted.

My sister was given Italian courgette seeds to grow on her allotment. They grew splendidly but took on an exaggerated phallic shape, over two feet long and with a bulbous end. She gave me one, which drew incredulous glances from bus passengers as I returned home with it. The flesh was firm, and excellent to eat.

Returning on a number 27 bus from Marylebone, in London, the driver took a wrong turn and found himself, and us, returning in the direction from which we had just come. He realised it by the time I had descended from the top deck to tell him. The foreigners aboard had no idea what the fuss was about. But the rest of us, who were quite aware of the error, had a good laugh and much jovial conversation about it and other things.

An old artist friend, on holiday in Majorca, nearly drowned in a swimming pool. People thought that he was enjoying himself in the water, but his daughter heard his faint cries for help, and he was saved. It did not exactly spoil his holiday after only one day in a most expensive hotel, as his subsequent 10 days were spent in hospital, surrounded by and tended to hand and foot by pretty Spanish nurses, and all for free. I am glad to say that he is regaining his strength, and after a good Sunday lunch with us, his sense of wellbeing, too.

A local dog, liable to yap for hours when his mistress is out, might be cured from making this disturbing noise when the anti-dog-barking electronic collar we have ordered for it is attached.

A blue tit has acquired the taste for an unripe pear in our garden. It pecks away, almost eating its own weight of fruit at each visit. We do not mind at all as we have five other pears on this tree-in-a-pot.

I have a good eye injected every so often to retain its sight. Last time out the needle struck a blood vessel as the eyeball was pierced. Now I walk around with a wife and a black eye.

If this is twittering, it’s quite good fun. But blogging is better.

Birds singing strangely

2010-08-15T12:37:00.000+01:00

Some years ago, I was in my small London garden in the dead of winter when a male blackbird landed on a vine post near me and started to sing.
Blackbirds do not sing in wintertime, but this one was not technically singing.
It went through its entire summer repertoire, quietly and under its breath. I stood transfixed at this quiet cascade of notes pouring out from a blackbird that did not even bother to open its beak.
Now much the same thing has happened with a robin.
We know our two robins well. They come into our shed to eat maggots and small morsels of Cheddar cheese, sometimes from my knee if I feel like it. Now they are mostly away, seldom appearing as they obtain new feathers in the annual moult.
In their absence a new robin has appeared on the block. He is a bright, upright robin, who wants company more than food.
He has taken cheese from flagstones beneath me as I crumbled it into small pieces and let them fall. He dashed in to eat them so close to my feet that I dared not move for fear of treading on him. He is brave.
Two days before writing this, Margreet and I heard what sounded like young birds singing in the distance, possibly all in line on a TV aerial, or so we imagined. We accepted these distant songs and took pleasure in them.
Then our new robin came to sit on a wooden sculpture a few feet away from where we were sitting. And, like the blackbird in mid winter, this robin was singing under his breath - in mid summer. The notes might have come from a long way away.
His repertoire of songs must have lasted for 15 minutes, and stopped only when a nearby blackbird shouted out her warning signal call.
A friend arrived the following day to witness and hear the same robin singing the same songs from the same perch.
I passed close to the bird to fetch cheese bits, which he declined to eat, not moving, and singing all the while.
Our own human conversation ended as we watched the bird and listened to his song – for perhaps five minutes.
The new robin is clearly very friendly, wants company, is fearless of people, and has songs to whisper that he wants us to hear.
We dearly love our regular pair of robins, but we also hope that this songster comes to stay. But robins are very territorial – ours particularly so. I imagine that there will be fighting before the winter sets in.

Glorious Goodwood

2010-08-08T20:57:00.000+01:00

I’m sure that I have written before on Glorious Goodwood, an annual horse racing meeting in Sussex that attracts the famous and infamous. But I can’t resist it, even if I am about to write much the same description.
Margreet and I had once more been invited to attend by my cousin (aged 88) who is now much in demand for wreath laying in Normandy, being among the first soldiers on D-day to land by glider near Caen and still be able to drive a car to France.
We met near Chichester and reached the racecourse slowly in his membership-badged/invalid-displayed car.
There, in sunshine and shade, we drank and ate in the open and watched the crowd. And what a fascinating crowd it was.
Among the male participants were elegant gentlemen in tropical fawn suits, polished shoes, and Panama hats with coloured hat bands displaying the colours of Goodwood membership or their club – sporting or otherwise.
Other men seem to lean more toward the fringes of society. Their suits were flashier, more pronouncedly striped, and of shinier material. Their shoes might be of patent leather or related to trainers. Generally speaking, the men’s clothing was fairly drab and mundane. Women, however, sparkled.
There were plenty of old trouts to be seen, some elegant and underplayed, others recalling, especially to themselves, the days of fashion in their time when they were in greater demand and more youthful in appearance.
Skirt lengths varied enormously this year, with some long, some of medium length, and some so short that most of the leg was on show, undercarriage that often would have been far better concealed.
There were many bared cleavages with breasts well flaunted, and bouncing to display their full worth.
In many an instance there were the dolly-birds, dressed as if in rather cheap Christmas wrapping paper, and tied with string, soon to be undone by their often much older and pot-bellied escorts.
Hats for the ladies were worn to enhance and attract – the most resplendent probably to attract the TV cameramen rather than for punters and their partners. These crowning glories varied from the odd feather to a fully displayed hand of them, to the short-brimmed pill box, to those with huge floppy brims – the latter flapping around uncontrollably in the notorious Goodwood wind and having to be held on by one hand.
A few sensible women chose to wear low or wedge-shaped shoes, sometimes shiny silver, or gold. Those dressed to the nines sported high stilettos, which sank into the grass aerating the soil, no doubt much to its benefit.
The three of us each wagered on every race until the last when we left to avoid the crowds.
Margreet’s theory was to pick horses that were not favourites but which our newspaper pundit reckoned to be a danger to the favourite. She lost a bit on the day – but not much.
Our host bet only on horses that had previously been the winner of at least one race. “They know about winning and the pleasure it gives.” He also favoured the nags that had been sent to the racecourse from afar, on the assumption that it would not have been worth the trouble and expense if it had no chance of winning. He broke even on the day.
My own method was to select the fourth favourite (or thereabouts) and bet on it each way, especially if the horse had an unpleasant or difficult name. The result was a good profit over and above the wager money. It was enough that when we returned home tired and hungry it enabled us to eat out on steak tartare and freezing vodka.
The gods had looked kindly on us all, showed us their bounty, and made it all a lovely day out.

A Positive Aspect of War

2010-07-31T21:30:00.000+01:00

One of the great outcomes of a major war is that people of all classes and from various strata of life are thrown together in a common cause.
This means that the lavatory attendant and the Lord must live together closely and have to get on with it.
In the last war, certainly, the self-important, mother-spoiled and pompous of any class, soon had it knocked out of them. So all were quickly seen as being of their own worth. The good and the bad came from all classes, sects, professions, religions or whatever. In the eyes of their comrades, superficiality was soon stripped from their outer surfaces and they were revealed as humans, humans with much the same aspirations and ambitions in life as those of their comrades.
Initially, one’s part in a war with its drill and be drilled gave little time for personal thought. It was not much fun. But you survived it. Then there was more time to make friendships as people developed their own maturing wartime characters.
Those of us who trained as pilots in the RAF and survived, eventually were demobilised and released from service life to go our own way. A few had jobs to return to. Because of our age, most of my contemporaries, who left school life to fight, had then to decide how to contend with the future.
Our war experiences had taught us that rich or poor, famous or not, opulent or pauper, we were all much the same as one another. And we had learned to speak to our fellows as equals. For this bit of free and major part of my education I was extremely grateful.
Some of us who flew together are still bonded by our wartime past. We meet before Christmas in friendship, and to celebrate the fact that some of us are still alive.
One of our number, a Bishop, has just died. We were friends as airmen in war, seldom, if ever mentioning religion. With one being a devout Christian and the other becoming a staunch atheist, our friendship continued in peacetime with me an artist and writer, and he a Bishop.
We will miss the Bishop, even though he became too frail to join our recent get-togethers.
But he has died and, no doubt, in his earthly Christian mind he will have gone to heaven.
I just wonder if having passed through the Pearly Gates he will be thrown together with a disparate bunch of characters, just as he was with us in wartime.

A marriage of Mustards

2010-07-25T16:14:00.001+01:00

Many of us have heard that the Colman family made their fortune not with the consumption of their excellent mustard but with what was left on the plate.
They would not have been so prosperous had their customers, like me, usually had a soup on the go.
Any mustard left over from the table and about to dry out and become useless and a nuisance to deal with, may be diluted right away with a little water and added to an on-going winter – or even summer – soup, to its considerable advantage.
Now it so happens that in our household I use Dijon mustard (bought in France cheaply in jars) mainly for sauces and English mustard powder turned into mustard for the plate. My wife, Margreet, on the other hand, uses Dijon mustard as an accompaniment to meats, and English mustard hardly at all.
So I wondered whether the combination of the two types might be to both of our tastes. And it was.
In a small pot, blend together about 1/3 Colman’s mustard powder with about 2/3 Dijon.
Any left over from a meal can go immediately into a soup or sauce and not be wasted.
Mustard harmony/marital harmony.

Melting Chocolate Bars

2010-07-03T11:44:00.000+01:00

In the early part of the ‘39/’45 war, when I was a refugee in America waiting to be old enough to return home to become an RAF pilot, I much enjoyed eating a chocolate bar, called OHenry.
Being then entirely dependant on the Killorin family who very kindly took me in, I earned my pocket money (for such as OHenry chocolate bars and ice cream covered in liquid marshmallow and chocolate shot), by selling subscriptions to magazines and garden work (avoiding the nasty poison ivy, which is prevalent in Connecticut).
Move forward to just after the war, in the late 1940s, when TB had destroyed my start in medicine and when I had become an art student.
In England we were still suffering from winning the war, and subject to severe rationing.
In France things were different. Food there was so plentiful that a war might never have happened (I suppose there’s a moral there).
So, in Paris, while drawing at La Grande Chaumière and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, I met up with friends made in those refugee times in America. Several were now in their Foreign Service. Among them was Jeremy Hodson, who was one with whom I kept in touch afterwards.
Move forward once more, now to 1959 and Vietnam, before America’s disastrous war there.
Jeremy Hodson was based in Saigon in the employ of the U.S. government, and living within the kind of compound of American life and artefacts that suits them when abroad.
He wanted to escape those confines and see what was actually happening outside Saigon, and to understand the feelings of Vietnamese people.
He managed to obtain permission to travel a long way north toward the 49th parallel (the border between North and South Vietnam) and to take me along. We were to see, among other surprising things, many South Vietnamese troops being trained to fight their fellow countrymen in the north (crazy) should those in the Communist north encroach on the American-run south.
Armed with food aplenty in ice-boxes, including OHenry bars, we headed north, a journey about which Jeremy wrote a report for his government (ignored) concerning the feelings of the Vietnamese people toward their northern countrymen and of the Americans.
Back in Saigon, and now knowing of my enthusiasm for OHenry bars, he very kindly gave me a whole box of them.
The room in which I lodged had a fan in the ceiling for air-conditioning. In the extreme heat at that time, the chocolate bars melted – to become a thick liquid. To consume flowing chocolate in a steamingly hot climate is not a particularly appetising prospect.
Move forward again to now, as I write, in a period of hot English summer.
With OHenry bars unobtainable, my wife, Margreet, kindly surprised me with a gift of its near equivalent – a bar with a fudgey centre, surrounded by roasted peanuts with a coating of milk chocolate.
The bar was beginning to melt like the OHenry bars in Vietnam. So I shoved it into a freezer drawer of our refrigerator.
What came out, hard, cold and crisp, was quite delicious – and very different from the bar that went in.
It was not the first time that I have frozen chocolate bars and greatly enjoyed the result. I recommend the procedure – even in cooler weather.
Belgian-type chocolates were not a success. So it is probably only run-of-the-mill chocolate bars that respond well to this freezing treatment.

New potatoes in buckets

2010-06-26T17:45:00.001+01:00

In early summer, when new potatoes are not yet obtainable from greengrocers or market stalls, those grown in buckets outside at home form a special early summer treat.
After my abject failure to grow potatoes in the plastic sacks much advertised for the job, I experimented with growing them in the black plastic buckets now on sale almost everywhere.
It is necessary to drill holes in the bottom of these buckets, then to cover the holes with broken crocks to aid drainage,
Obtain seed potatoes of an early variety and allow them to chit (grow small green/brown sprouts in the daylight), and put 3 on a 3” layer of the compost covering the crocks. Then cover these with perhaps 3” to 4” of compost or sifted soil mixed with compost.
When the green leaves (haulms) appear, add more compost to almost cover the leaves (leave some greenery showing).
Again, allow the leaves to grow, almost covering them with compost.
Leave a couple of inches of the bucket unfilled to make room for water (spuds like plenty of it).
This year (2010) I planted 3 Arran Bard potatoes in each bucket on the 9th of March, harvesting a small crop (a good dish) of small potatoes after 66 days from one bucket. The second bucket was emptied 77 days after planting, and provided 10 walnut-size potatoes from each seed potato (two dishes).
This was well before English new potatoes appeared for sale in the shops.
So, from the buckets, resting on a shelf in the garden, we enjoyed two early potato treats.
After boiling them for about 16 minutes I like to serve these delicacies in individual bowls into which I put salt, a lump of butter and a splash of vinegar. On top I sprinkle a little chopped fresh mint.
The hot potatoes melt the butter and all the potatoes can then be coated with the butter/vinegar/salt/mint mixture before being eaten – as a course on their own. If eaten cold, a vinaigrette or thin mayonnaise is the better coating, and the spuds are then best peeled.
Our harvesting is done by cutting off the haulms for compost, and then upturning the bucket of soil and potatoes on to a marble topped garden table.
The potatoes are then extracted to be washed and eaten (skin on), the spent seed thrown away, and the roots with enmeshed soil composted.
This home grown treat makes for a lovely and exciting annual, springtime ritual.

Fusker again

2010-06-18T10:43:00.000+01:00

I am rather devoted to the name “Fusker” because many of the hits coming through the ether to our computer arrive by that name.
Well, “Fusker” is, I believe, something Swedish. It may be a computer programme or even something a little more risqué. But hits come in.
I speak of hits without much authority because my own computer is not connected to the net, being an old-fashioned machine that I feed with 3 ½” floppy disks if I want to transfer anything from it to my wife Margreet’s very up-to-date edition of modern technology.
I suppose that many of these Fusker hits relate to neighbour James May’s cat of that name, an animal of considerable character but somewhat of a villain.
I recorded in this blog a fight that I once had with that cat which sent me to hospital for repairs and injection after a bloody conflict on my territory, which I won. Since when, the cat respects me as “top cat” and keeps his distance.
Many of us love cats. We just want to stroke them and hope for their friendship. That is why they are so popular as pets.
When newcomers come to live nearby we warn them of possible trouble if playing with Fusker.
Now Fusker loves houses more than people. Leave the door open and your back turned and Fusker is indoors – slipping in often unnoticed.
When inside he investigates the house from top to bottom, sometimes finding sympathetic hosts who allow him to stay – and even people who will feed him choice morsels (I believe smoked salmon to be one of his favourites).
But Fusker poses danger.
As we are frightened that he might turn on a child, we warn those who do not know him of potential danger. So we warned two new neighbours who have a young boy.
True to form, Fusker infiltrated their newly acquired home, prancing up and down stairs sizing up the place and its inhabitants.
The new master of the house managed to apprehend him and was pleased to stroke the quiet miscreant - as one is wont to do.
Then Fusker sank his teeth deep into the man’s hand.
At least the child was safe, who witnessed the attack and thought that it was hilariously funny.
Fusker is a villain of course. But at least he can make a child laugh.

Garden update Spring 2010

2010-06-12T11:29:00.000+01:00

As spring turns to summer it is a chance for me to write a garden update.
From a large pot we harvested – and ate raw – half a dozen spears of asparagus. They were delicious – tender, sweet and juicy.
This brings me to almost conclude a theory.
I have tried several times to grow two or more varieties of a perennial shrub or plant of the same genus in the same pot. And each time, after initial apparent success, only one has survived.
The most recent example of this has been in that asparagus pot of ours.
In it I had planted, over several years, crowns and seedlings of several varieties. They all started well, but beneath the soil a battle was taking place, leaving only the strongest to survive.
This fight between roots beneath the soil in pots has occurred in this London garden between two types of viburnam, two varieties of lavender, and now asparagus. The strongest wins each time. The others die. I won’t bother to try this double or multiple planting again. Nature has taught me a lesson. She has spoken.
In the winter I dug out a pot of mint which had noxious weeds in it, and its plastic was, anyhow, beginning to break up. I replanted a few of its young, rooted strands in a new, strong, drained, black plastic bucket, filled with crocks at the bottom and clean soil above.
This has produced plenty of healthy mint stems, and is the happier for its regeneration. (In tipping out the old mint, I noticed that its roots spread out quite near to the soil surface, and not much downward.)
A success has been in the strawberry pot of geraniums (pelargoniums). From its top are growing three colourful varieties, and from the holes in its side grow the trailing kind. And from one aperture sprout the thin pointed leaves of a thrift plant that was given to us and had no other appropriate place in which to live. It looks a bit odd as it sticks out – rather like hair, favoured by modern youths.
Unable to keep the corms of the Bolivian begonia throughout the winter, I now have two young (gift) plants of its “Bonfire” variety growing well and flowering early.
I have written about my disappointment with plastic sacks for growing potatoes, and the lack of success when using them the following year for Swiss chard (not bad), carrots (poor), and beetroot (very poor).
Well, this year I constructed a frame of bamboos and string and, in the sacks with replenished topsoil planted broad beans (The Sutton) and climbing French beans. These are doing splendidly, with the broad bean plants now in full flower and the climbers climbing.
As for potatoes, I continue to plant three seed potatoes in each of two black plastic buckets (crocked and drilled for drainage). This year I chose the variety Arran Bard.
After 66 days we harvested one bucketful and enjoyed a feast of small, new potatoes (last year we harvested after 77 days). As the spuds were still quite small, we will wait another 10 days before harvesting those in the second bucket.
Potato harvesting is done by first composting the haulms, and then turning the bucket upside-down on a marble-topped table in the garden. Spuds are sorted out from the light soil, which is either to be rejuvenated in the compost heap or spread on the small areas of garden not covered by flagstones.
There should be apples and pears aplenty this year. Herbs do well, and the pieris continues to please. Roses are fine (Rev P-R and Typhoon), and our robins, having brought up young, continue to land in our shed next to us to eat morsels of cheddar cheese and dried maggots.

French Toast

2010-06-04T21:22:00.000+01:00

This simple dish is ideal for breakfast, a snack, or child’s tea. It was certainly popular in my childhood. Yet now I find it to be a little dull. So, besides adding any leftover mayonnaise to the mix, I have been experimenting by spreading either Marmite or Bovril on to one side of the bread before dipping it into the egg/milk mixture. I have also been adding a shake or two of Tabasco chilli sauce as well. All these additions have been successful in invigorating French toast. The amount of milk to be added to egg in this recipe is a matter of experiment. With the texture of my home-made bread being denser than bought loaves I use a little less milk than the volume of egg. The recipe below is for about two slices, perhaps three.

FRENCH TOAST

You will need:
Slices of bread (with or without crusts)
Eggs
Milk
Tabasco sauce, possibly
Marmite, possibly
Bovril, possibly
Pepper and salt
Olive oil
Cinnamon powder or grated nutmeg, possibly

Break an egg into a soup plate. Add pepper and salt. Whisk with a fork or whisk, and add about the same volume, or a little more, of milk. Whisk again.
To add taste, consider spreading either Marmite or Bovril on one side of the bread, and adding a shake or two of chilli sauce (like Tabasco) to the mixture.
Soak slices of bread in the whisked liquid and fry them in olive oil on both sides until golden. Some then sprinkle over a little cinnamon powder or grated nutmeg.

Roquefort beurre

2010-05-29T09:55:00.000+01:00

You will bless me for this information

ROQUEFORT BEURRE

You will need
Roquefort cheese
Butter

When I was in Paris as a student in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the offered items of restaurant and café food were still peasantly simple – staunch and traditional favourites of the natives.
Both radishes and Roquefort cheese were offered with a pat of butter. Why?
I never quite saw the reason why the taste of radishes would be enhanced by the addition of butter. And just how should that combination have been eaten anyway?
But I was soon to notice that customers used a knife to blend the Roquefort with the proffered butter. So I did the same.
The result was delicious. The salty astringency of the cheese was transformed into a blend of softness and creaminess – retaining all the wonderful taste of the cheese.
Roquefort may still be served with butter in French eating places. In Paris, the only restaurant that I know of that still serves that “traditional” menu, and at a reasonable cost, is the enormous and fun Chartier, 7 Rue de Faubourg Montmartre.
The last time that I ate there, Roquefort was not on the menu, but Blue d’Auvergne was, and it was offered with beurre. Radishes were not featured.
So I recommend that for a cheese treat you put a lump of butter in a bowl, allow it to soften, add twice its volume of Roquefort cheese, and mash the two together with a fork.
Place the bowl in a freezer bag if keeping it in the refrigerator.

Ice-cream sauces

2010-05-22T22:02:00.000+01:00

The STOP ME AND BUY ONE ice-cream man on his tricycle cart of old, served blocks of ice cream, wafers, cones and water ice in a triangular stick that you pushed out of its container as you sucked or bit. I do not believe that anyone thought of adding sauce to the blocks of plain vanilla made for home consumption. But there are lots of sauces for ice cream in the kitchen that are normally used for other purposes. They need no further preparation, or very little. So should you have dull ice cream to use up, have a good look around the shelves and cupboards.

ICE-CREAM SAUCES

You will need:
Any of the following:

After the most popular chocolate sauce (see below), a fine sauce is golden syrup, straight from its can or jar, or heated. When blended with melted butter it is even better. Chocolate spread is another potential sauce. Jams and marmalade, straight from the jar or heated and diluted with a little water are other ideas. Grated chocolate, nuts, sultanas, currants, green raisins and peanut butter (worked in and excellent), all make good sauces on their own, or mixed. Crumbled plain digestive biscuits may not strictly be a sauce, but the crumbs are delicious on ice cream. But top of my list comes hot or cold chocolate sauce, made simply by melting some butter, adding plenty of sugar, half its volume of cocoa powder, a little vanilla essence and water to form the consistency required. Whisk it all together as it heats through. If too much water has been added (it won’t need much) and the sauce too thin, just whisk in more sugar and cocoa powder. I let the mixture rise in the pan three times over heat – only to make sure that the sugar has melted completely. Put what you do not need to use right away into a screw-top jar, make sure it is cold, and refrigerate until wanted to enhance ice-cream at other times.

a French bathroom

2010-05-16T15:07:00.000+01:00

A room contains, in the normal run of things, four vertical surfaces (walls) and two horizontal surfaces (ceiling and floor).
On a recent trip, our bathroom in France had 22 vertical surfaces, 13 horizontal surfaces (where dust could lie) and one angled surface.
It was a conglomeration of surfaces, mostly, or partly, blue tiled (ceiling part tiled).
Pleasingly held in my affection are the arrays of bathroom pipes and pipe work that can resemble a complicated knitting pattern.
With general upgrading, these open knots of copper tube have been much reduced over the years in which I have been to France, but still offer enough wonky pipe work to intrigue.
Beautifully exposed in that same bathroom (brought up to three star standards) were six horizontal pipes and eight vertical ones (some large to very large), all plain to see when lying in hot water.
And nearly always there is a little hole somewhere at floor level – presumably to please mice.
The surfaces, pipes and mouse hole contrive to create bathrooms of infinite enjoyment to the interested observer. And for that panorama of fun the French don’t even have to try.

String and a blue tit

2010-05-09T17:19:00.001+01:00

Outside and near to my kitchen window are three plastic sacks of soil into which I am planting beans this year.
Broad beans are already growing well there.
To accommodate the climbing beans (Climbing French and Blue Lake) I have constructed a bamboo frame, giving each plant either a bamboo or a vertical strand of green, garden string up which to climb.
Looking out of the window one early morning in late April, I saw a blue tit struggling and swinging round at the top of one of these strings.
I witnessed its distress for a short time before planning to go outside and free the poor fellow.
Then I noticed that it was sliding downward. Perhaps the string had become wound around its leg.
Then, apparently still struggling, it fell lower still.
It was about to be saved when I noticed that the bird was not attached to the string at all, but holding on to it.
Lower it went, pecking at the string all the while.
By the time the blue tit had reached the bottom of the string it had harvested a beakful of short green strands, made of jute, sisal, hemp, or whatever garden string is made from.
Then off it flew to add decoration to its nest.

Rice salad

2010-05-01T14:14:00.000+01:00

Rice was used in England’s past mainly for rice pudding. It was also added to soups and stews – especially in poorer households. Then the Indians and Chinese came.
Rice salad does sound a bit boring. But with a bit of imagination it can be turned into one of the very best of dishes as a first course or main one for vegetarians. A large bowl of this salad will make a summer's day feast - and be economical and easy to prepare.
You could boil rice especially for it, but why not cook more than will be wanted for, say, a curry or whatever you normally eat with rice. Then you could start to prepare the following day's salad with the surplus. Add oil right away and stir it in, otherwise the rice will dry out and some grains will revert to their hard state. I favour brown rice for this salad, although it takes almost double the time to cook.

RICE SALAD

You will need:
Rice
Oil
Vinegar
Pepper and salt
Various additions

Let us presume that you have cooked more boiled rice than wanted for a meal. Put what is left over in a bowl and add oil, vinegar (or lemon juice), pepper and salt. Give it a good stir. If the rice is still hot or warm, so much the better. Cover the bowl and refrigerate it when cold.
The next day, add some capers, possibly green peppercorns (I soak black peppercorns in vinegar for a month or more and use a teaspoonful of them) and a chopped gherkin or two. That's a good start - and finish. But there are other items you might like to add, like chopped nuts (I favour pre-roasted cashews, pounded), pine nuts, chopped onion, chopped garlic, chopped parsley or coriander, chopped fresh or dried herbs, chopped fresh chillies, a dash of chilli sauce, pounded coriander seeds, chopped hard boiled egg, diced cucumber, chopped green, red or yellow peppers, chopped cumquat pieces, green raisins, sultanas, olives and on, and on, and on - though not all together.
Whatever you choose to add, you can hardly go wrong. But start with a simple few ingredients - like nuts, capers and chopped gherkins. These give the salad some “bite”. Nuts and peppers will give it added colour and texture.
From plain and simple rice you will now have made a delicious salad. For a main course, decorate it with halved hard-boiled eggs, tomato quarters, sardines or anchovies. Add a few stoned black olives to delight the eye.
To elevate the salad to a much higher plane, skin a small knob of fresh ginger root. Cut this up into the smallest of morsels, or grate it. Add this and stir.
Before you have turned cooked rice into a salad, you might consider saving some as the stuffing for vine leaves, when in season. Soften the leaves with boiling water. Mint will be your main addition to the rice as stuffing, with cooked minced lamb.

Dieppe Travel 2010

2010-04-25T11:36:00.000+01:00

It’s an age thing I suppose. Travel enlivens and freshens the mind and, when in France, fills the stomach as well. Travel means change, and change is a restoring stimulative.
But having to use airports is “out of bounds” for travellers like us if humanly possible. I find nothing at all to recommend them, despite having flown and still being fascinated by aeroplanes.
Which leaves holiday breaks in the UK as a possibility. But here, good restaurants tend to be over-expensive and their cooking often still horribly Nouvelle Cuisine. And English hotels and B&Bs, when last we tried them, would charge per person, not per room. The French are more sensible in this respect, and thus encourage return visits.
This leaves long voyages on liners as a possibility, where you might not like your fellow passengers (or those who want to make friends with you), put on weight, and possibly contract whatever virulent viruses are doing the rounds.
At least we are lucky to have France, Belgium and Holland in mainland Europe near at hand. All are foreign and well worth a visit without too much hassle or difficulty.
The tunnel to France, despite the occasional blockage or fire, is an ideal way to experience “abroad”. But Paris is now becoming prohibitively expensive, as is the more restrictive Brussels.
By ferry to reach nearby mainland Europe leaves Dover as the quickest crossing port. But it’s a long drive from London, and we are not enamoured with Calais.
Crossing to mainland Europe via Portsmouth and ports beyond, involves much longer sea crossings.
Which leaves “our” crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe as a good, all-round, best bet.
Formalities in Newhaven are minimal. There are no “Micky Mouse” approach roads to contend with, and four hours later you are in France – in an ancient port (which we once flattened and where we were flattened in turn more recently by the Boche). It is a port/seaside town where one hardly has to proceed further.
This maritime town is “walking” size. The restaurants are plentiful and good – with fish dishes superb.
The hotels are comfortable and far cheaper than in England. (I have written extensively on most aspects of Dieppe earlier in this blog and try not to repeat myself.)
So, in a word, that’s where we go – for short breaks and the re-stocking of larder and cellar.
Now, this wine re-stocking is not, as you may think, with French wine (though we do buy our “house”, Pays d’Oc, wine there) but mainly bargain-priced New World wines which the French discount, thinking that by being produced outside France they are undrinkable. These wines are often distinguishable on the shelves by the layer of dust on them.
We also return with cheeses and other foods, though with the present exchange rates, this is becoming less financially beneficial. But many foods are cheaper than in England. Endive is one. Dijon mustard is another. Smoked chickens are good value and delicious. Paper goods are to be recommended. Garlic and shallots are always on our list, but were very expensive the last time we bought them (out of their season). Fruit and vegetables are so fresh that we invariably “top up” the car with them for our return journey.
We were there in the spring, and will return in the early winter (when scallops are in season once more) when children are in school again and the tourist season has subsided.
And anyhow, where in the world in 2010 can one eat a splendid four course meal with aperitif, unlimited cider and red wine, with coffee included. Of course you will lunch at shared tables with newly scrubbed-up workmen, and eat in a shed. And all this would cost you £10.80 per head. Where in the world could this happen? Surely only in France.

Cheese and garlic pancake for drinks

2010-04-16T14:41:00.000+01:00

Margaret Costa, the well-known cookery writer at the time, was coming to dinner and my then girl friend decided to make a gougère. It was not a success, being rather flat and solid. But our culinary guest loved the result. There must, I thought, be an easier and quicker way of making such a delicious failure. A taste-alike, quick-to-make equivalent was needed for times when people were invited for drinks on the spur of the moment. The following was the result. Everyone loves it - especially children. It is not just a Shrove Tuesday treat, but one to be enjoyed at any time of the year.

CHEESE AND GARLIC PANCAKE FOR DRINKS

You will need:
Plain flour with baking powder or self-raising
Salt and pepper
Egg or eggs
Dijon mustard
Chilli sauce (like Tabasco)
Milk
Cheddar cheese (or a stronger kind)
Olive oil
Garlic

Sieve some plain flour with baking powder or self-raising (say 3 ½ heaped dessert spoons) into a large bowl. Add pepper, salt. Stir.
Break a large egg or two small ones so that their contents fall into a depression in the centre of the sifted flour. Add a good dollop of Dijon mustard and a shake or two of Tabasco sauce (or another kind of chilli sauce).
Break the eggs with a whisk and start to stir from the centre outwards, adding milk (1/4 pint). Keep stirring and beating until the mixture is thick, yet smooth and free of even the smallest lumps. Or I’m sure a blender would do the same job.
Add some grated Cheddar (done beforehand), or blue cheese to make a stronger taste (too much cheese may make the pancake oily). Stir again.
Put olive oil in a frying pan to coat the bottom and sides. Add at least a couple of garlic cloves, squeezed from a press. Spread these morsels evenly around. Cook them until they are about to brown.
Now pour in the mixture to coat the bottom of the pan evenly. Reduce the heat to very low and wait until the bubbling mix begins to dry out on its upper surface. This will take about 20 minutes (depending on the heat and the pan),
It is now time to toss the pancake - or turn it over as best you can.
Tossed, with its brown and garlic side now uppermost, with the point of a knife cut slits in the surface to allow moisture to escape from within.
Lift a corner to inspect the under side (cooking will take a further 10 minutes or so). When cooked and golden brown, turn the pancake on to a board. Offer it to your guests cut into small sections.
With my frying pan and gas heat source at just above its very lowest, the whole cooking process takes 30 minutes. So half an hour before guests arrive for drinks I start to cook the pancake.
It is a good idea to make quite a lot of the mixture if guests for a party will be arriving over the period of an hour or two. Then, as you leave the kitchen with the first hot pancake, add some more garlic and mixture to the frying pan - and so on. The success of this delicious pancake will surprise you, and delight your guests. Children love it, too. But don’t tell the young about the garlic, as some don’t like the sound of it.
Get children to hand around these pancake squares. Reward them. Like dogs, if given a job to do, they (and you) are happy.

Winter Socks

2010-04-09T22:09:00.002+01:00

As with most people in cool climates, I like my feet to be warm in winter.
Ever since visiting Holland some years ago and discovering socks, called SKI Socks Extra Soft, my feet have been as warm as toast throughout the cold months.
Being woven in a soft, wooly kind of way, made for skiing and not daily walking, they are inclined, after a while, to get thin at heel and holey at toe – two pairs (darned a bit) surviving one winter.
Discovering in early springtime that I was now almost out of these miracle socks (sort of stockings, really) and finding my last two pairs to be near the end of their days, with next winter’s warmth in mind, I wrote to my sister-in-law, Henny, who lives on the Dutch/German border, asking if she would kindly look in at a Hema store to see if there were any left in my size.
Her husband, Bert, found that none were available, so contacted the manager of the shop, who very kindly telephoned the supplier (United Sox of the People’s Republic of China – with the slogan “We Knit for Europe”) to assess the position. Having obtained the number in China, the telephone was handed over to my brother-in-law.
The English/Chinese spoken from so far away was somewhat difficult for him to understand, but the gist was clear.
These particular socks were bought by some of their most revered Dutch customers, one by the name of Pates Lobbels (which, funnily enough, sounded a bit like my name) and also an Honellable Clown Plince, who used them the year round at his lodge in the Alps during the European winter and the mountains of Patagonia in summer (their winter).
Unfortunately, annual production ceased on Chinese New Year’s Day, leaving only four pairs available, as His Loyal Highness the Clown Plince had bought the rest. He was velly solly.
But because we were velly honerlable customers, the cost of these four remaining pairs would be – nil.
This was wonderful news, tempered only by me noticing that the date of my brother-in-law’s email was the 1st of April.

Beef, Coriander and Carrot Stew

2010-04-01T11:42:00.000+01:00

This simple but very distinctive and tasty stew demands shin of beef and long slow cooking (three hours anyhow on top of the stove). In a cold winter its coriander taste offers a hint of spring. I believe that two Oxo cubes are better than a beef stock cube, and chopped coriander stems better than its leaves. But that’s a fine point of judgement, the differences being slight. This is as good a beef stew as any.

BEEF – BEEF, CORIANDER AND CARROT STEW

You will need:
Olive oil
Onion
Garlic
Shin of beef
Flour
Oxo cubes (2) or beef stock cube (1)
Pepper and salt
Carrots
Coriander

In a saucepan or iron casserole fry chopped onion and garlic in olive oil. When this is just turning brown, add chopped up shin of beef.
Carry on cooking, stirring all the time, until the meat has turned colour (but just whether this browning makes any difference in sealing in the goodness I don’t know, and somehow doubt).
Now sprinkle over a dessert spoon of plain flour, some pepper and salt, and two crumbled Oxo cubes or one beef stock cube. Stir well.
Add water to well cover the meat. Then put in plenty of cleaned and chopped carrots.
Lastly, add chopped coriander stems (wash them well) or plenty of chopped coriander leaves.
Bring the ingredients to the boil, stir well, and leave the pan on the lowest heat for three hours.
Then eat, or leave the stew until the next day when it will taste even better.

Note. To add a small chilli or a shake or two of Tabasco sauce may be to your taste. And if using a stock cube instead of Oxo, add a little liquid gravy browning. The depth of colour the browning imparts is much to the benefit of the look of the stew.

An Acting Career

2010-03-27T10:31:00.000Z

Now that there is a new Peter Greenaway film out (“Nightwatching”), I am reminded of my (distinguished) career as an actor.
For the Greenaway film, “The Cook, the Thief etc.”, I was invited by friends to join them and to act as a restaurant customer.
Driven to enormous studios in the suburbs, I spent much of the day at a table pretending to eat a pink crayfish. That would not have been so bad had the crustacean not been stinkingly rotten.
There was action around me as tableware was thrown about with explosive force and, I think, a fork shoved through someone’s cheek into their mouth. The latter action was contrived, with fake blood in full flow, by the visual effects and make-up departments.
At the conclusion of a long day’s acting (the whole day produced but five minutes of finished film) we were given fish and chips as payment and thanks.
When the film eventually reached the silver screen, I was, obviously, anxious to witness my skills as an actor. But sadly, I think, only just think, that I saw the back of my head. And I’m not even sure about that, either.
But I really have had a career as a serious actor.
My first job, having been to art school (The Central), theatre design school (The Old Vic) and the Covent Garden Opera House (as scene painter), was set designer in repertory theatre at High Wycombe.
Presenting a new set weekly, with reading the play, working out a floor plan, constructing a model, painting the scenery, installing the set and furnishing it with hired and borrowed items, was an onerous task, made tolerable by applause for my hard work as the curtains opened. Pay was minimal, but experience great.
Our cast was limited in number. In one scene of a play, two ambulance men were required to cross the stage with someone on a stretcher.
Our number could run to only one ambulance man, but not two.
So there I was, a genuine actor for a week, with my name in the programme – as second ambulance man.
So when I see a television drama or stage performance, I think to myself that I, too, was once an actor.
If I am ever asked to act again I will demand a better part – first ambulance man, perhaps.

Luck in France 2010

2010-03-20T10:44:00.001Z

In life you need luck on your side – pre-ordained or by absolute chance does not really matter, as long as it is good luck, and preferably plenty of it.
We had just spent three nights in France, mainly to re-stock our wine supply, which gets depleted at some speed with our daily consumption, along with some generous entertaining.
And we also go to France to eat well, breathe in sea air, walk off excesses, buy food of various descriptions, and generally absorb a foreign way of life. Theirs is another culture with those in-built identities that seem as nature to them but of a separate past and present to us.
Our first stroke of luck this time was to find that our favoured “house” wine was “on promotion” – six bottles for the price of five. And it was cheap enough already.
With an anniversary celebration meal in mind we headed for a favourite restaurant, to find it closed for their annual holiday. But another place nearby – almost if not absolutely in a shed, was open.
We lunch early, which was fortunate as there was only one sitting, where clients (mostly workmen) arrived to eat at between mid-day and 12.15.
Here we were given a house aperitif (cider/cassis) and told to take as much as we felt from a most interesting spread of hors d’oeuvres.
Already we were clearly in luck.
We were then offered a choice from three main courses.
On our table stood a bottle of cold and delicious fizzy cider and a litre bottle of red wine. They were there to be drunk as we might see fit – and at no extra cost.
A lovely cheese board of local produce followed the main course, then a dessert and then coffee – total price £10.80 a head, with service, all inclusive. What luck!
We lunched there every day, feeling that we could do no better elsewhere – even in favoured old haunts.
There was still room in our car for more wine, the kind we buy at a separate supermarket, obtaining there old favourites for a modest sum as they are “foreign” wines to the French, and so not to their liking. It was lucky that the ones we wanted were available.
I have used the same hotel in France for probably 65 years or so, knowing the grandfather founder, son, and now daughter. They are as friends.
It so happened that recommending this hotel to neighbours in London at one time, we heard that they were given a discount on the price of their room – something that had never happened to me, and probably being their most long-lasting and faithful client.
So I jokingly made this clear to the management. When leaving for England, we were given a fine discount. I’m not sure that this was luck at all.
We were very early arrivals at the departure terminal in Dieppe, so were positioned in the front of a particular row of cars that were about the same height.
After some time, the overseer of boarding order pushed aside the lightweight bollard in front of our car and waved us aboard. Margreet switched on the motor to start and go. From beneath the bonnet came not the noise of a starting motor but one of angry ratchets.
General consternation broke loose as French port officials passed judgement on our mechanical failure and decided to hit the starter motor with a sizeable hammer to free the mechanism within it - without success.
Well, telephone calls were made to all and sundry breakdown services, and we were pushed aboard – last.
On the way to England I wondered why only twice in some 15 years of use had our splendid Toyota RAV 4 let us down – and each time the circumstances had been almost identical. It happened before (unsolved) in Santander when about to board the ferry back to Portsmouth, and now it happened again when waiting to board the car ferry in Dieppe to carry us back to Newhaven.
I solved the problem when lying down during the smooth crossing to England.
In both instances we had arrived well before the departure time. And although on each occasion the engine had been switched off, the electronics were still on and working, in the form of dashboard lights, radio, window-winding motors and such. And during that wait the battery had become drained of its charge, with not enough power remaining to engage the starter motor with the engine.
Others might well take note of this possible state of affairs.
Shortly before arriving at Newhaven I asked the Purser of our vessel to see if someone aboard could connect up our car’s battery with jump leads. If successful in starting the car it would save us from having to be towed off the ship or engaging the services of the now waiting AA breakdown man.
Being the last and lonely car in a dark corner of the vast car deck, jump leads were brought, connected, and the engine started. We were on our way.
So were we lucky to eventually get home unscathed, or unlucky, after such a spell of good luck, to suffer the indignities and embarrassment of mechanical (electrical) failure?
Perhaps good luck is always tempered with a little bad.

Mushroom Soup

2010-03-20T10:40:00.000Z

Here are two methods of making mushroom soup – the first with dried mushrooms and the second with fresh. Both are excellent, the fresh mushroom one being the easier.

MUSHROOM SOUP

You will need:
Mushrooms, dried or fresh
Onion
White sauce or plain flour
Butter
Flour
Milk
Pepper and salt
A chicken stock cube

Dried mushrooms impart, for less cost, more taste to a soup than the fresh variety, though if using the latter their taste will be enhanced by turning them into soup.
Buy a small handful of dried, sliced mushrooms (porcini are best). Shake them well in a sieve to rid them of sand. Soak them for 24 hours. Extract the mushrooms and, with knife or scissors, cut them into small pieces. Keep the (brown) liquid, but decant it off any sand that has fallen to the bottom of the water.
Now make a white sauce using butter, flour, milk, water and the liquor in which the mushrooms were soaked Add the mushroom pieces.
You will want to add extra liquid in the form of milk, or a dissolved stock cube or two, to give the soup the desired consistency and extra taste.
Season as thought necessary - and serve. This soup, like the one below, which uses fresh, white, button mushrooms, is even better the following day.

Using fresh mushrooms:
There is hardly a simpler or more economical way to make a glorious soup than the following way when using fresh, white, button mushrooms.
Cut up a good size onion as finely as possible. Then do the same with fresh mushrooms – say as many as you can hold in cupped hands (or 250g). Both of these operations take time – but it is worth it.
In a saucepan melt a good lump of butter, and into it stir your chopped onion. Cook this slowly until the onion is transparent. Now add the mushroom bits. Continue stirring the mixture over heat, sweating them all together. Add pepper, salt and a sprinkling of flour – a dessert spoon at the most. Stir this. The mixture will now be quite tacky. Crumble in a chicken stock cube. Now add plenty of milk (1 1/2 pints will do), stir, and allow the soup to boil very, very slowly for, say 20 to 30 minutes. That’s it. And the result will be quite delicious, taste as if you have used cream, and be even better the next day. So make it the day before wanted if possible.

Tomato and ginger sauce for noodles

2010-03-13T17:08:00.001Z

This is my simplification of Singapore Noodles, being a lot easier to make and much quicker, too. In fact, the sauce can be made well before wanted and heated up as the noodles are being boiled. So it is a convenient dish to serve up at a dinner party.

TOMATO AND GINGER SAUCE FOR NOODLES

You will need:
Oil
Onion
Garlic
Root ginger
Pepper and salt
Chopped tomatoes
Chilli sauce (like Lingham’s)
Prawns
Noodles (preferably when sold in one portion squares)

In oil fry chopped onion until cooked, but not browning. Add to it plenty of chopped garlic and a good quantity of finely chopped root ginger. Then add pepper and salt.
Now tip in the contents of a can of chopped tomatoes and some chilli sauce (like Lingham’s).
Cook the sauce through for 5 minutes. Now add cooked prawns – halved if too large.
Boil the noodles in salty water as directed (3 to 5 minutes, probably). Drain them in a colander, cutting through them in the shape of a cross (with kitchen scissors) to make serving and eating them easier.
Add the noodles to the sauce (or vice versa). Stir and serve.

Chicken in foil

2010-03-11T10:05:00.000Z

As foil is an insulator of heat, I seldom have a use for it. But here it is put to great effect – even though the foil is tending to keep the heat away from the chicken in its package.
From a Halal butcher buy two roasting chickens (quite cheap). At home cut off the four legs and bag them for the freezer and later use. Do the same with the wings, and then the thighs. Use these off-cuts for Indian or Thai curries at a later date.
Now cut off the double breasts (on the bone) from the carcasses. Use one or two for this dish (one double breast is more than enough for two people). Pressure cook the carcass bones for soup stock, should you feel like it.
Now we are ready.

CHICKEN - CHICKEN IN FOIL

You will need:
Foil
Chicken
Butter
Pepper and salt
Garlic
Thyme
Rosemary

Lay out a sheet of foil, and on it place a double breast of chicken (on the bone). On this put two knobs of butter, pepper and salt, garlic (squeezed from a press), and a small branch of thyme and one of rosemary (these herbs both grow well in pots in the garden, on a balcony, or attached to an outside window sill).
Make a parcel of the chicken, folding over the foil to seal in the contents.
Lay the parcel in a baking tin, and cook it in a fairly hot oven for an hour.
Undo the hot parcel, and slice the chicken from the bone. Serve it with mashed potato, and possibly another vegetable, or salad, or what you will.

Patés and Terrines

2010-02-18T17:54:00.000Z

When I lived and entertained in the country it was commonplace for me to make patés. (Terrines are much the same but I tend to call the rougher editions terrines and the smoother ones patés.) These were first courses, served with hot toast, or put on to biscuits to be served with drinks. Patés are most convenient dishes, cheap and easy to make, cater for the ideas of an experimental and imaginative cook, and keep well in the refrigerator or deep freeze. Having left the country for the town, I continue to make them for meals, drinks and as gifts.
If new to cooking these delicious and most useful dishes, start with the basic recipe – more or less. A “handful” is about 250 grammes. Other amounts are up to you.
Just why I failed to add paté-making to either my “Dockland Cooking Past and Present” book or “The Oldie Cookbook” I have no idea. So here it is – with variations.

PATES OR TERRINES

You will need (roughly):
A handful of minced, fatty pork (the fat is essential)
A handful of minced beef, veal or lamb (veal is best)
A handful of minced or finely chopped liver from pigs, lambs or chickens (lambs is best I think, and chicken liver, though excellent, tends to look red and raw in the finished paté)
A few anchovies
A beaten egg
A dessert spoon of sifted flour
Pepper and salt
Herb or herbs (I favour just thyme)
White wine
A spirit (to give the paté a little extra punch and individuality)
Lard (or butter) for greasing a container before adding the ingredients
Thinly cut rashers of smoked streaky bacon (especially for paté made in a bread tin)

Either make your paté in a handsome receptacle, like a lidded china pie dish shaped as an animal (my favourite is a sleeping duck), or in a bread tin.
Line the containers with lard (or butter). If using a bread tin, from which the paté can be turned out on to a flat surface when cold (by heating the exterior of the tin with hot water), apply thin overlapping strips of smoked streaky bacon stuck to the inner surfaces. Any bacon hanging over the sides can be folded over the paté before it is cooked.
In a large bowl put the minced meat and liver. Add a few pounded anchovies. On to it put a dessert spoon of sifted flour, a whisked egg, pepper and salt, herbs (thyme alone for preference), with white wine and spirit – like brandy, calvados, whisky, etc. to make a fairly sloshy mixture. It must be sloshy, when you have used your hands or wooden spoon to blend all the ingredients together.
Fill your greased containers with it, folding over the bacon if that has been your method. Cover them with foil, held securely by elastic bands or string.
Now place the container/s in a bain marie (a baking tin containing a small depth of hot water). Bake this in a medium oven for about 1 to1½ hours, depending on size. Make sure, once in a while, that there is enough water in the baking tin. If low, top it up with boiling water.
Take out your paté/s to cool. This may take a fairly long time. If using the bread tin method, put a weight on top of the foil to flatten the upper surface. This will make the paté more stable when it has been turned out to be sliced. Another bread tin weighted down with stones or filled with water will do this job satisfactorily.
That is the basic paté. And excellent it is.
You may want to make a “house” paté by giving it individuality. There are countless ways to do this. I have used just sausage meat successfully, and added green Chartreuse. I have made an excellent “Indian” paté with minced pork, chopped fresh chillies, chopped ginger root, dried methi leaves as the herb, and the usual egg, flour, pepper and salt. And sometimes I have added chopped cornichons (small gherkins), pressed garlic, capers, and now, nearly always, green peppercorns (that I have had soaking in vinegar for some time) and shelled pistachio nuts, both soaked in wine or spirit overnight. As another addition try stoned and chopped black olives (they look like truffles) or stoned prunes. A nice one, for instance, involves 1 lb. of minced pork, a beaten egg, some of those green peppercorns, black olives stoned and chopped, walnuts, shelled and broken up, and salt. Stir it together, cook in a bain marie for an hour, press and refrigerate. On it goes. A more complicated one would involve minced pork, lamb’s liver, chicken liver and lamb’s kidneys. Add to this some fried onion and garlic, a chopped chilli, some rosemary leaves, crushed juniper berries and peppercorns. Now add a dash of sherry or calvados. Finish with a beaten egg, salt and lots of chopped parsley. Then cook as usual. Finely chopped ginger root adds a kick to paté. And some lime juice sharpens it up. Liquids, like egg, lime juice and spirit might make the mix a little on the liquid side, so be careful not to overdo them. It should all firm up when cooked and pressed. I believe that thyme is always an excellent herb for patés. Combinations of meat and spices are really all up to you. Making patés is fun. Patés are economical, too – especially if you have many mouths to feed.
Once, when I was in Paris, a slice of foie gras was served with a small pile of what appeared to be dried green peppercorns and salt. So good was this addition that I have now often served it with my patés and terrines. To make the mixture, grind up or pound together about ¾ of dried green peppercorns to ¼ sea salt.

To keep my hand in after a spell of paté-making inactivity, I have experimented recently with various combinations of ingredients, each added to the above, basic, uncooked paté mix. They were: shelled pistachio nuts (available shelled and salted in Indian condiment stores); milled pepper and oregano; garlic, chilli and pickled peppercorns; olives and anchovies; capers, cornichons and pine nuts; horseradish and mint (extracted from mint sauce); foie gras (gift); and one made with leftovers from all these experimental mixes added to the basic paté. Each was of interest, with the mix of all probably the best.

THE MAYORS AND THE MAYOR GALLERY

2009-12-31T17:02:00.000Z

To buy a picture from Freddy Mayor you not only had to know him, but be liked by him. Otherwise there was no hope. And if you were friends, you were friends for life.
His gallery prices were reasonable. And should you have to sell one of his pictures, you always returned it to Freddy - always.
I can not recall either how or when we first met. But I do remember when I bought my first picture from him.
So I must have known Freddy for some time just to be admitted to the inner sanctum of the Mayor Gallery, then at 14 Brook Street, London, W.1.
The gallery was small. There was a picture or two on display in the window, and one or two beyond. Public, interested in art, might venture in – but not too far in, then leave.
You had to pass through an inner door to meet the owner. That passing over the threshold was, in itself, somewhat of a privilege.
On gaining entry, Freddy would be seen at his desk, probably working out which horses to back for that day. The smell of fine Havana cigars enhanced the air. He would be surrounded by a selection of wonderful works of art both large and small, for Freddy Mayor had one of the most perceptive eyes in the art business. Each painting would be of the top flight – among the best, and sometimes very avant garde. For he was a pioneer of modern art.
Besides having a fine eye for a painting and an appreciative eye for a pretty girl, he possessed an absolutely lousy eye for a horse. If he would be on a bad streak, he might back each horse in a race to be sure of a winner (which seems rather a good idea to me).
I was clearly a bit flush with cash at the time, and in work, either designing or painting scenery in the theatre (ice shows paid well, and when working on ice I wore my wartime pilot’s sheepskin-lined boots to keep my feet dry and warm).
So it was that, on the 16th of February 1956, I was allowed into the holy of holies. There I saw a lovely little Matthew Smith painting (a study for a larger one, and originally given to the British consul, William Ashcroft, in the South of France), and bought it for £145. After that I expect Freddy and I went out for a Guinness or lunch. When really flush we might also visit Carlins to select a box of Havana cigars, where they opened several boxes for you to smell before you bought. And you were given a fine cigar on the house to smoke on your way home.
I still have the receipt for that painting from THE MAYOR GALLERY Ltd with its 2d stamp over-signed by Freddy. I treasure it.
Over the years I continued to buy from the gallery – a Paul Nash, two Edward Burras, an Henri Gaudier-Brezska, and bronzes by Lynn Chadwick and Kadishman – each now worth a small fortune to their present owners. For reasons of solvency, all, except for a bronze dog, were returned to the gallery for re-sale.
In a 1960 exhibition of drawings, done on a yearlong voyage around the world in 1958 and 1959, I entered the world of Cork Street art galleries for the first time, exhibiting at the Reid Gallery there. Most were sold, with some more going to Japan for a 1961 exhibition in Osaka. I then used one hundred of them to illustrate my Mudlark Press account of the trip - “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World”.
Nearby, in Cork Street, was the most recent Mayor Gallery, now run, internationally successfully, by the late Freddy Mayor’s son, James.
In 1969, James came to a show I had at the Qantas Gallery (The Relief of Kut), in Bond Street nearby, where he bought one of The Nine Logs from the Tigris. It was a jetsam paddle, withdrawn from the Thames in Limehouse, in a way that those of our army might have done from the Tigris when they were besieged by the Turks in Kut during 1916 (in what was Mesopotamia, now Iraq). On the paddle was inscribed “God Punish England”, a common graffito in that distant Arab land. So I was delighted, in this creative way, to rekindle my association with James Mayor and his Mayor Gallery - and Cork Street.
In either Freddy’s or James’s day the idea of me ever exhibiting my work at their gallery would not have entered my head, their offerings being so exalted.
In 2006, when I abandoned writing books and articles and returned to painting after a writing break of 25 years, James Gould, the 20th century expert on English art at Christie’s, South Kensington, saw my 1954 painting of “The Shed”, Chelsea Football Ground, and asked if he could sell it at his auction house. It went for an enormous sum, re-establishing me as an artist of that period.
I continued to work, now with pastels, depicting my ideas in shape and colour of the garden, the shadows of aircraft, and the relationship of yacht sails and boats’ hulls on land. As it took some 55 years for my early stuff to come to light again, so these, I thought, might, with any luck, do the same in the distant future.
So, in 2009, it came as a complete and wonderful surprise when James Mayor offered me a November/December show of Aircraft Shadows at his Cork Street Gallery.
With nice words written for it by James May (television writer and Top Gear presenter), Geoff Cowart, (editor of h&f News) and Christopher Neve (art critic and author), and a piece in Aeroplane, the show did splendidly well – making me, in the process, both a 20th and then a 21st century painter.
But most of all, it is the connection with the Mayors and the Mayor Gallery that pleases me the most.

Oven extras

2009-12-17T21:42:00.001Z

When baking meat or casseroles in the oven, there will probably be unused space available. I like to use it.

COOKING OTHER DISHES IN THE OVEN WHEN IT IS IN USE FOR ROASTS OR CASSEROLES

You will need:
Baking pans that can be covered and your choice of ingredients
Olive oil
Pepper and salt
Vinegar
An herb

In your baking pan, or pans, you could put chopped onion, chopped garlic, chopped apple, chopped tomatoes, chopped potato, chopped aubergine, chopped celery and on and on. But it is best to cook a single ingredient, or two, possibly three. A grand mix becomes a sort of ratatouille. And those of us who have lived in the country and had a surplus of vegetables and cooked them all together for the freezer and later use, will know how very bored one can become with the result.
Always start these extra-oven dishes with olive oil, some vinegar, pepper and salt. Add your chosen chopped ingredients.
Add an herb (one is better than lots), though I do sometimes use Herbes de Provence.
Before covering the tin with another of the same size, or foil, turn over all the ingredients with the fingers to coat the contents completely with the oil, vinegar, herb, salt and pepper mixture.
You may want to check the contents and turn them over at some point during the cooking, but most will be ready to eat without attention when the main dish is ready.
Besides my regular mixture of mainly peppers and onions, two other dishes have recently been great successes.

One of my favourite first courses (hot, warm, or cold) is aubergine in tomato and onion. Generally made in the slow cooker, this can be cooked very successfully as an oven extra.
Into an oven dish that can be covered with a lid, another dish, or foil, put chopped onion, olive oil, chopped garlic, pepper, salt, and a little vinegar. Just cook this until the onion is transparent. Add the contents of a can of chopped tomatoes. Stir it around. Now cut small aubergines into two down their length and place them, cut side down, in the onion/tomato mix. Cover and cook in the oven. They may not take quite as long to cook as stews, roasts and casseroles.

The other recent success had been Brussels sprouts. Trim them, and then coat them with olive oil, pressed garlic, pepper, salt and vinegar. Cover and oven-cook.
Should you be cooking a stew or casserole in the oven, and have some sprouts handy, place them on top of the ingredients. Cover and cook. Even those who can’t stand sprouts may well come around to liking these.

Jim and Aircraft Shadows

2009-12-05T12:37:00.000Z

Jim at the Mayor Gallery

2009-12-05T12:35:00.000Z

Commentary on Aircraft Shadows

2009-11-09T13:09:00.001Z

Aircraft Shadows

2009-11-06T11:52:00.000Z

EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS AT THE MAYOR GALLERY, 22a Cork Street, London W1X 1HB (Tel. 020 7734 3558)

From the 24th of November 2009 until 18th December 2009, I will be showing my AIRCRAFT SHADOWS series of paintings at the most prestigious Mayor Gallery www.mayorgallery.com)in London.

Being satisfied with sales of early work at Christie’s, and thinking of the present work in the long term (well, after all, the Christie’s choices were painted 50-60 years ago), I was both surprised and more than delighted when offered this show.

This means that I will be rather busy painting, compiling lists, framing, and all that goes with a show, to be writing much in the blog. But I will bring previous blog pieces up to date in respect of robin life and pot-gardening experiments.

Exhibition details will follow on both this website and that of the gallery, where pictures on show will be posted shortly before the exhibition.

Recipe: aubergine Kefalonia

2009-11-06T11:51:00.001Z

One of the great pleasures of foreign travel is to test local recipes and, if delicious and unable to find out exactly how they were cooked, try to reproduce them at home with ingredients that are readily available. This one comes from a Greek island in the Ionian Sea, and made more or less to a recipe provided by a hotel receptionist. It is a simple way to cook aubergines and has become one of my favourites. The result is rich and filling. I serve the aubergines as a hot hors d’oeuvre in winter and cold in summer.

AUBERGINE KEFALONIA

You will need:
Aubergines
Olive oil
Onions
Canned chopped tomatoes
Vinegar
Sugar
Pepper and salt

In a frying pan, later to be lidded, cook plenty of chopped onions in olive oil. As soon as the onion pieces are beginning to become transparent add the contents of a can of chopped tomatoes, a dash of vinegar, a pinch of sugar, pepper and salt.
Stir this around to form a sauce. Then add small aubergines that have been halved lengthwise, skin side up. Very small aubergines, now often available at market stalls, are ideal for this dish. If using large ones cut them down their length to form chunky pieces.
Put the lid on the pan and cook the aubergines slowly in their sauce for about 30 to 40 minutes (I use a lidded electric frying pan at its slow cooking setting), adding water if the sauce begins to dry up. They are ready when quite soft all through.
Lift them into a serving dish or arrange them on to individual plates. Serve hot, warm or cold.
French type bread to dip into the juices is almost essential.

Recipe: Beef - sliced, marinated top rump

2009-11-06T11:49:00.000Z

Do not think that a slice of top rump must be fried or grilled (thickening the air in your kitchen with lots of fatty droplets) and then divided. Another way to cook it is this way, being very quick, clean and delicious.

BEEF – SLICED, MARINATED TOP RUMP

You will need:
A slice of top rump
A marinade of your choice – a normal one being mainly oil, vinegar, (garlic), (chilli), pepper and salt, and a herb or herbs of your choice – fresh or dried. For a spicier, barbecue-type of marinade try oil, tomato ketchup (this will have vinegar in it), paprika, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, chilli, pepper and salt.

Divide your slice of top rump into, say, 1 ½” (4cm) strips. Then cut across these strips, forming the thinnest slices possible.
Marinate the meat morsels in a mixture of your choice (see possible list above). They can now stay covered in the refrigerator for from hours to days.
To cook, just fry them very quickly in a pan, and serve with mashed potato, with possibly a green salad or a vegetable of your choice.

Chicken and Parsnips

2009-10-31T12:36:00.001Z

When parsnips are at their best in the late autumn and winter, this simple dish uses them with chicken to form a delightful stew.

CHICKEN – CHICKEN AND PARSNIPS

You will need:
Oil
Onions
Garlic
Pepper and salt
Flour
Chicken leg and thigh
Parsnips
White wine
Chicken stock cube.
A herb, like rosemary. Tarragon or thyme

In a casserole or saucepan on top of the stove fry garlic and chopped onions in oil of your choice until the onion pieces are transparent. Sprinkle a little flour over them and stir it in. Add pepper and salt.
On this mixture place chicken pieces – a leg and thigh will do for two. Keep the skin on and bones in.
Pile on peeled and cubed parsnips – two fairly large ones should be enough.
Add a glass of dry white wine and then water to almost cover. Crumble in a chicken stock cube if you feel inclined to do so. Now add a herb of your choice – placing it on top.
Boil it all gently for half an hour. Discard the herb if on a branch. Extract the chicken piece(s). Skin and bone them when cool enough to do so without burning your hands. Discard the skin and bone. Chop up the chicken meat and return it to the pan.
That’s it. You can continue the cooking on low heat for some time, thus always being sure that the dish is ready and hot when wanted at the table.

Aircraft Shadows Exhibition at The Mayor Gallery, London

2009-10-15T16:35:00.005+01:00

Avro Lancaster Drift Scale (vertical)

From 24 November 2009 until 18 December 2009, Jim will be exhibiting at The Mayor Gallery, 22A Cork Street, London W1, a series of eight large and 32 small pastels entitled Aircraft Shadows.

TV presenter James May writes: 'There is a great deal of sentimentality in aviation art, but this exhibition avoids that trap.'

A voyage through Europe, September/October 2009

2009-10-13T16:35:00.003+01:00

Margreet is the main driver when we go to mainland Europe. I am the map-reader.
So I had prepared for our voyage through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and France once more by buying the latest maps, deciding on our route, and compiling a list of reference numbers, dates, hotels and all the rest.
Then Margreet came home with a satellite navigation gadget.
We programmed it to take us to our first hotel in Belgium – magic.
With James May’s cat, Fusker, wanting to jump into our car unnoticed at crack of dawn (he loves cars like his master), we drove for a Dover – Dunquerque crossing of the Channel. Our satellite lady’s voice gave us initial directions, which we dutifully took, only to find that we use a better way out of London from our house.
But the gadget soon realised that we were not to be bullied and that we had our preferences when navigating through our own district.
So, with altered and now correct instructions we were dulled so deeply into believing her instructions that I abandoned my usual job of map-reading and left it to her to tell us what to do.
When approaching the Channel Tunnel she insisted that we go there. But we wanted Dover. Whereupon she became so confused that she started to direct us any-old-where, and even back to London.
Sat-Nav magic does not always work. Now we were to see where she would take us when reaching France.
On the boat she (“Olga”, because she is a spy in the sky and Olga Poloski was a beautiful spy) thought that we were still in England. But she soon got the hang of Europe and directed us beautifully to our hotel in the main street of Hoogstraten, in northern Belgium.
She bleeps when we are about to enter a speed camera zone, but does not know of long phantom traffic jams. And her accent with town names baffled even Margreet, who speaks all the lingoes thereabouts.
The town centre of Hoogstraten is dominated by an enormous, double onion-domed tower on a 1320s to 1330s church. This edifice is constructed of pink and white bricks – looking most impressive, if somewhat mottled.
It was our first day abroad, and it is not until arriving and having a drink at a roadside bar that one realises that one is in a foreign country with foreign customs and tastes.
In Hoogstraten we heard jackdaws (no longer in our part of London) above and watched cyclists riding like mad on cycle paths below them, knowing that bicycle-riding has priority and right of way over pedestrians and motorists. So we watched ambling pedestrians, wildly speeding cyclists, cars being parked with aplomb, busses, and a constant stream of tractors and industrial trucks, all beneath the chatter of those jackdaws on the streetside, in trees and on red-tiled roofs.
From afternoon until nine in the evening and probably beyond, we were astonished to see so much farm machinery and farm activity passing through the centre of a town. Huge tractors rushed from one side of town to the other with trailers of covered loads. Was it harvest urgency on the move for such a long period of the day? Sometimes we caught a glimpse of what appeared to be loads of finely-chopped, dried grass. Was this for some specialist cattle feed, or was it for silage?
We ate the kind of dinner I love – 3 courses (scallops, rare lamb chops and cheese) with copious quantities of Chilean and South African wine – none of which we chose – all included in the price of the meal. One eats well and over a long period of time when abroad. So we walked to our bath and bed in a slightly serpentine manner, being very careful indeed when climbing the high treads and steep stairs favoured in that part of the world.

23 September 2009
Except for the refrigerator in our bedroom that kept cutting in and off during the night, the Hostellerie de Tram, in Hoogstraten, turned out to have been an excellent choice for food, comfort and friendly (family) ambience.
When setting off for The Hague, Olga, our satellite guide, told us to turn left when, to retrace our steps to the motorway we would have turned right. We trusted Olga, and she was right, guiding us painlessly to our Mövenpick Hotel in Voorburg, once a Roman town but now part of The Hague.
It was during a morning beer that information reached us that an early painting of mine sold for a handsome sum at Christie’s. That called for another drink.
This new idea for restaurants of offering a number of courses and wine of their choice for a fixed sum, is a good one. It had worked beautifully for us in Hoogstraten. So now we were delighted to accept the same arrangement at Griff , in Voorburg. The food was good, if rather over the top with Nouvelle Cuisine, effusive waiters, and the wine from South Africa, the USA and Australia, all excellent. But in the small print on the menu the wines were charged for as extra. The bill, therefore, was exorbitant – especially as the wine was charged for at £6 a glass – a good idea for the restaurant perhaps, but not for us. So when perusing such a menu in Holland be careful.

24 September 2009
I have written on The Hague before – and about the food at the Fat Kee Chinese restaurant (at Gedempte Gracht 23, where, if you don’t mind chicken bones, order, phonetically, Kip Paiper and Sout). Then there is the wonderful late 19th century Panorama Mestag, the No.1 tram from Scheveningen on the sea through The Hague and on to Delft, and a sex shop where I hope my drawing in the dark will eventually pay for their modest entrance fee.
The Mövenpick Hotel, where we had chosen to stay, is an international (anywhere) hotel, splendidly appointed in its rooms and plumbing. The management had the stroke of genius and fun to supply the bathroom with a small, yellow, red-beaked, plastic duck – the kind that coated the sea somewhere by mistake and swam away the length and breadth of the oceans. It now brightens up our bathroom in England.
The Dutch, I have noticed, are inclined to mix up their food before eating it. This combining of ingredients on the plate seems to please them. But when Margreet and I stopped for an early morning coffee and roll in Voorburg (hardly a place for refreshment seems to open until late) it was, I suppose, no surprise to see on the snack menu the following ingredients as a filling for a roll, called, appropriately,”Breadroll Terrible”: Liver, ham, salted beef, meatsalad, egg, vegetable salad, picalilly (sic), mayonnaise, ketchup and onions. That should have set up a Dutchman for the day.
Do we, in England, Anglicise foreign dishes? We may do. I hope not. The Dutch certainly do. Take that far eastern delicacy satay – slivers of pork, threaded on to a stick, grilled over charcoal, served with a light peanut sauce, and bought by the number of sticks wanted. The Dutch turn it into lumps of meat on a stick, covered with glutinous gravy. Or take liver. The Italian fegato is cut very thinly and cooked in butter or oil for seconds, and flavoured with lemon juice and sage. The Dutch (even in an Italian restaurant) serve great lumps of overcooked, connective-tissued liver, covered with a thick, rich onion gravy.
Dutch appetites are enormous. They are a large people. So they are far too generous with their servings for the likes of us.
We enjoyed a pleasant aperitif of white wine in a bar that one would hardly choose from others. It was a bar of noise – or several noises. Beneath the railway main line, with the sound of trains above occasionally drowning out conversation, cars passing close by, Sinatra singing in the background and parakeets above, somehow combined to make it a very pleasant place for a drink.
Sound mixtures and levels may be quite pleasant or, like noise from running a tap in our bathroom, high pitched enough to make it quite intolerable for Margreet.
Whereas in England leaves on trees were still mainly green, in mainland Europe, especially in areas where it had been dry, autumn leaves were turning colour and falling in the path of our car.
In The Hague, from clumps of tall trees, the raucous chatter of parakeets was to be heard. So they are thriving in Holland as well as in England. And it was interesting to watch these birds from high up in our 6th floor hotel room, where I was able to see that they fly surprisingly quickly over a considerable distance, but quite often change their minds about direction as they go.
Being in a country of flowers, and especially tulips, market stalls were offering a myriad choice of bulbs and winter-hardy plants. The flower stalls were crammed with every kind of bloom – regardless of season or country of origin. These were being bought already made up as arrangements for a vase or, if chosen individually, expertly gathered together to make a display to take home. The Dutch certainly know about horticultural matters, this being very evident at a quite charming garden centre next to the Mövenpick Hotel in Voorburg. It could have been a discerning person’s private garden.
Margreet found that shopping for clothes in a Voorburg shop was quite satisfactory. In one, an assistant asked her if we were just married, so happy we were in each other’s company.
The Dutch kiss three times when greeting or parting. In a crowd, one sometimes is in contact with the moisture left on cheeks by predecessors. I have wondered how often diseases are passed on by these friendly gestures.
There is another national trait that I have noticed. The Dutch write the figure 8 in a different way from the English. Theirs starts going down left, crosses over above in the middle, and finishes by going down right – if that describes it.
We were in The Netherlands for Margreet to take a short course of brain training. My father (born in the late 19th century), who took my brother away from school because he was forced to do lessons when he should have been playing sport, believed in three important maxims in life. They were Observation, Recollection and Retention – maxims that apply today. From Margreet’s course it seems that nowadays imagination and creativity are held to be of almost higher importance than academic prowess.

27 September 2009
And so to Bad Bentheim, a small town in Germany, noted for its spa waters and world-renowned stone (its formidable castle and the Statue of Liberty rest on it).
A short way out of town my Dutch in-laws have bought a house on a holiday-home housing estate as an investment. It is an extremely clever concept house, constructed quickly and made with the considerable use of man-made materials. It, like its neighbours, is set on a concrete platform in a constructed landscape, layered and hillocked from a plain slope. On this the houses are positioned at different levels within a system of cleverly constructed gullies to channel away storm water to keep the building platforms dry.
The houses themselves have much the same look to them, but differ in size and external decoration. And although situated very close to each other, give a certain feeling of privacy, even though there is very little when sitting outside to eat or drink on the extended concrete slab.
With a central command office, the owners must allow their houses to be rented out for part of the year for several years, rental being guaranteed by the management. So, because of this, the furnishings in each extremely well thought out configuration of rooms, must be of a straightforward, neutral and robust variety – chosen from what is on offer by the management.
They are very modern houses, incorporating the latest technology in installed equipment. Quick to construct (I hear that the roof of quarry tiles was lifted, whole, into position), is this the way houses will be constructed in future?
The large project was designed by a Dutchman and, being near to the border with Holland, has attracted many Dutch participants.

28 September 2009
And so, in a slight fog, we helped to tidy the house for the next renters and made our way south through Germany.
Olga was wonderful, as finding our hotel in Koblenz would have been mightily difficult without her.
Our hotel, Diehls, bordered the Rhine, and our room overlooked the water.
Unless one was devoted to the study of size and design of barges, sightseeing craft and river cruise ships, interesting shipping was non-existent.
We took an ancient cross-river ferry (we were the only passengers) to the main shopping centre of Koblenz, where we ate excellent schnitzel – there being, as far as we could see, no sausages on any menu – but pizzas galore.
Then an hour’s gentle pleasure-boat trip up the Rhine and just into the Mosel and back, aided the digestion.
We were surprised to see that waterborne traffic on the Rhine kept to the left-hand side of the river. And then they seemed to all be steering on the right hand side, then sometimes both - with no sound signals given. Just why there are not more accidents on the river is hard to understand.
Although the Rhine is supposed to be much polluted, I saw quite a lot of ducks and swans on it – and a cormorant.
There was another flow of clean water to hand. It had happened before, but in less salubrious circumstances, in France. The scenario is this: When glass screens are used instead of shower curtains, it is difficult to reach the water-control mechanism for running a bath.
Plumbing custom dictates that when the shower is turned off, the system reverts to water coming from the spout to fill the bath. So, if this mechanism fails, stretching in to turn on the bath water often results in a shower from above, soaking you and/or the bathroom – clothes and all.
So the only way to fill these baths when just the shower works, is to put the showerhead into the bath and turn on the water.
If the pressure is high, it is necessary to hold down the shower head and pointing way – or it will jump around like a frightened snake and shower you and/or the room once again (Deutchland, Deutchland wasser everywhere).
That is all I have to say on the matter – except that hair-dryers also make (as Margreet discovered) for my case, fairly good clothes dryers.

29 September 2009
This was to be our last full day in Germany and we had not yet enjoyed their much-renowned sausages.
The day before, a lady, who ran a kiosk by the Rhine, told us of a place to go – Altes Brauhaus, Braugasse – in the old part of Koblenz. Her advice was excellent. We ate their home-made sausages, sauerkraut and mashed potato, and drank the excellent local beer (Königsbacher Pilsner). The place, decorated in white and blue for the forthcoming Octoberfest, was also as it should be – the warm colours of aged wood, iron framed and scrubbed pale wood tables, hospitable, and with highly efficient waitresses and contented customers.
We bought further German fare of smoked pig and sausage to dine on in our room, as we had been disappointed with the aggressive service and far too expensive wines in our hotel.

30 September 2009
Having left our unjustifiably expensive hotel, the only redeeming feature of which was our room’s expansive view of the Rhine, we headed south to Strasbourg. With regular stretches of autobahn under repair, we passed the Maginot Line (of which nothing was visible), into France, and on to Strasbourg. There we had a most excellent lunch of Alsace choucroute (cooked until quite soft with sweetish wine and juniper berries) with red and white local wine in carafe (both wines cooled).
After Germanic weight, the professionalism, food, lightness of touch, and even friendliness of the French were in evidence. And for myself, with hardly a word of German at my command, I could just communicate, almost as if I knew the language.
Whereas it used to be that costs in mainland Europe were cheaper than in the UK, now it is the opposite. Food, clothes, shoes, meals, and even some hotels are dearer. Beer in Strasbourg was excellent, 33cl of it costing the same as a pint at home. An ordinary bottle of Alsace in a grocery store, however, was £11. One just had to accept the high prices and get on with it.
Strasbourg boasts that it is the only city in France to have an advanced cycle path network. It may be. But in the centre this meant that there were a few stencilled pavement signs depicting a cyclist and a splayed-out man. No-one seemed to know who had priority, and where. The result was that the pavements were shared by those on foot and those on cycles. Advanced chaos would have been a more apt description than advanced network.
Waterborne tours of any city with extensive canals are generally interesting. The Strasbourg tour included the use of two locks, one being in the heart of the Petite France district where millers and tanners lived and worked in the 16th to 17th centuries. Their half-timbered houses abound and water rushes through and beneath ancient mills and over sluices. The tour reaches the European Organisation buildings that display considerable areas of heartless glass sheet.

3 October 2009.
Strasbourg possesses a fine tram system, with vehicles that resemble Eurostar trains with large windows. Their tracks are separate from the road, and crossed by cars only at junctions.
Olga was woken early for our return drive across France and was probably as sleepy as we were, because we kept getting lost, with her telling us to U-turn several times, and even directing us on to areas reserved for trams.
And it was a little of the same confusion from her when we arrived at Dunquerque after a 6 ½ hour drive through France, Luxembourg, Belgium and France again. Here, the autumnal wind off the sea almost blew us off our feet as we searched for a nice place in which to eat.
It is my custom, sometimes to Margreet’s disapproval but often to her delight, to ask a local (be it waiter, pedestrian, shop assistant or whoever) where we should eat locally, reasonably, and well. This I did in Dunquerque, accosting a man about to enter a block of flats. He gave us two places from which to choose, one being near to our hotel on the port. So, at La Réserve, we drank carafe wine and ate as well and as imaginatively as at any place during our two weeks away. It was a delightful gastronomic conclusion to our continental voyaging.

Latest Sale

2009-09-24T10:06:00.002+01:00

'Girl Bathing by a Bridge over the Loddon River' - details to be found here.

Exhibition of paintings at the Mayor Gallery, 22A Cork Street, London, W1

2009-09-21T21:54:00.003+01:00

Robin life

2009-08-23T08:48:00.002+01:00

ROBIN LIFE - update

Robin life baffles us, and just when we thought we were beginning to understand a bit of it.
Let us start with Mrs Robin (Erithacus rubecula melophilus), a bird we taught first to feed on cheese bits from the flagstones in front of our shed, then from the floor inside our shed, and then from my knee.
Her mate appeared each spring to do his bit, even sometimes taking cheese from my knee to help feed his young. Then he was gone - until the following spring. She was once more our resident bird, guarding her territory in the leaner months for food.
One year, when our resident pair were feeding their young in a nest box attached to the rear of our London house, a strange robin appeared. He saw what went on in the local robin world and came immediately to my knee for cheese. With these morsels of Cheddar he wanted to help feed Mrs Robin’s young – but was repulsed. But he was an insistent bird and was eventually allowed to take part in the feeding process. So now we had three birds coming to my knee for cheese, as part of a mixed and balanced diet.
This new bird had the unusual habit of hovering in the doorway of our shed before entering. So we named him Hoverbird.
The young flew, Mrs Robin’s mate left, and so did Hoverbird. We were back to normal, with Mrs Robin in charge of the territory.
Then Junior appeared. Junior was a fine-looking young bird. We presumed that he was one of Mrs Robin’s brood. It was not long before Mrs Robin left and Junior took over. He was a lovely fellow, who would eat from my knee and, if a bit full, would sometimes sit with us to pass he time of day, always looking us straight in the eye. He was fascinated with Margreet’s feet, especially when her red-painted toenails were exposed. Like his mother, he, as with all robins, had an eagle eye and, even from our shed, might suddenly dash to the other end of the garden to grab a spider.
One day he appeared at our shed door and surprised us by hovering. Had he perhaps reverted to his youthful habit of hovering? In this case Junior might have been the grown-up Hoverbird.
But no. This was indeed our original Hoverbird back – and after an absence of two years. Junior had now left.
Hoverbird, as he was before, a rangy bird, thin, a bit scruffy, upright, full of nervous energy. He appeard to be shy with his hovering habit but, becoming more at home again, would fly straight in to my knee, eat more than Junior did and, standing tall, has a watchful eye on all the goings-on in our shed. When Margreet is not there he will spend time looking at her empty chair.
Why do robins suddenly come and go, one taking over from another? Do they have some form of agreement? There is no sign of fighting. And there is little sign of territorial conduct, although they exercise their right (if they are quick enough) to eat dunnock food when cheese bits get thrown out to these shy birds when they beg for it.
We taught one robin to eat from my knee (and sometimes Margreet’s, too) and three others have learned from her and have copied the habit. So they are observant and learn from other robins.
We are very lucky to have such friendly and lovely-looking small birds to enjoy and observe. But understanding robin lore is not easy for a human.
For almost a week the garden was bereft of robin activity. Then one appeared – a new one, named “The New Boy on the Block”.
On day one he perused the garden, settling to eat food from the small tray where only hemp and sunflower seed is offered.
On day two he was getting closer to the shed.
Day three saw him entering the shed.
On day four he was eating bits of cheese from where I put a supply, and eating cheese bits from my adjacent knee, but not landing on it. He had learned all this on his own – not having had other robins to copy.
Then the weather became cooler and we were less often in the shed. But cheese bits disappeared with regularity from the open shed, taken from the place where I leave small morsels for robins. Who was taking it?
Then came a spell when robins were conspicuous by their absence. But in mid October a brand new one appeared. We dubbed him “Handsome” as he was very keen on his appearance, loved a drink, followed by much splashing around in the bath. But he was very shy. A lively fellow, he investigated the territory with zeal, even turning a leaf over to see and eat what was beneath.
Although he was clearly intent on making our garden part of his winter territory, he was not at all sure if our tamed dunnock posed a threat to it. So sometimes he would break off from his eating (mainly) spiders to chase off the shyer one of the two.
Naturally we had to train our new resident. The first move was for him to find out that morsels of Cheddar cheese tasted good. These bits were thrown well out from our shed on to garden flagstones. Then the bits of cheese were positioned nearer to the shed door. And after that a bit of cheese was placed outside and some just on the floor inside. In he came. Now it was time to place a morsel or two on the floor and more on the box of bird food right next to my knee. He is now eating from there, where we can have a good look at him and he can get used to our voices. But he is still nervous when close to us.
With winter in the offing, that is where the matter will rest – until the spring, when I hope he will still be here and ready to come to my knee for cheese with which to feed his young.

Vegetables in pots 2009

2009-08-13T16:47:00.003+01:00

(Latest developments)

VEGETABLES IN POTS (Latest developments)

I wrote in this blog last year of my experiments with growing vegetables in pots in my London garden. Now, in the spring of 2009, a new idea has come about with the purchase and delivery of 3 plastic sacks for growing new, salad, and main crop potatoes (the bags being 17” or 43 cm. tall and 14”or 36 cm. in diameter, and supplied with 5 seed potatoes for each sack).
As my London garden is small (4 paces by 16 paces) and with potatoes not to be planted in the same soil for several years, the compost filling would have had to be replaced each year. And where would I put the spent compost in a mostly paved garden?
So I decided to use the sacks for (roughly) the rotation of crops, retaining their compost filling – being a mixture of my home-made compost mixed with the contents of grow bags – the latter being excellent in quality and obtained at a minimal cost.
Wanting only new potatoes, which are very special to eat and hard to obtain early in the season, I will use the 3 bags for: sack 1 (BEANS) for dwarf French beans, radishes and dwarf Italian courgettes, sack 2 (ROOTS) for early potatoes (Swift) followed by a planting of carrots and beetroot, and sack 3 (BRASSICAS) for radishes, Swiss chard and leeks. The correct rotation has been plotted on paper for the next 3 years.
I will write on the results and conclusions.
Although this summer’s experiments will be dealing mainly with the success or failure of the three rotation sacks, these can not be divorced from other vegetable-growing in the garden. Even flowers are connected to the ensemble, providing colour, light or shade, and flexible design.
So, beside the sacks, I am experimenting this year with growing potatoes in ordinary black plastic buckets (with drainage holes and crocks). As last year, there will be broad beans in buckets, asparagus in a large pot (mainly for the foliage), parsley in a pot, thyme in a pot, sorrel in a pot (having over-wintered well), salad leaves in pots, leek seed in a pot (to be planted in sack 3 when handleable), tarragon in a pot, fennel in a pot, a globe artichoke in a pot (decorative), tomatoes in last year’s ground (now soaked with dilute Jeyes Fluid because of possible blight), mint in a sunken bucket, rosemary in a pot, sage in a pot and, new this year, autumn-planted garlic in the ground and shallots in the ground (both in a limited space – but they do not need much.
For fruit, there is the productive and trouble-free black wine grape (Triomphe d’Alsace) giving shade beneath an arbour and fruit along its 73 metres length around and about and back and forth around the garden’s walls, an espalier-trained Morello cherry growing on the north-facing wall from daffodil-planted ground and, in pots nearby, a fig, a pear and an apple.
I am trying yet again to grow mistletoe on the apple, binding in the seeds beneath bark with string. These experiments were coated with rubber solution as protection from the elements. To blend the pale string bindings in with the colour of the bark, they were then coated with soil before the rubber solution set.
For the decorative aspect, there is an earthenware trough of spring crocus and snowdrops. Pots of tulips and lilies will give small blocks of bright colour. Impatiens (busy lizzies) will give masses of colour throughout the summer months, with fuchsias and geraniums (pelargoniums) providing the same.
Roses (The Reverend F. Page-Roberts and Typhoon – the latter, in my opinion, being best rose ever) grow from earth in a corner of the garden.
The winter-flowering cyclamen will become dormant in their pots, as will the generously-flowered mahonia.
On the kitchen window sill is a splendid jalapeno chilli (having flowered and fruited summer and winter), the last year’s Bolivian begonia corm to grow again (it did not), and an aloe vera.
So, as spring appears and leads to summer, there will be a lot to watch and look after. What an interesting year of pleasure lies ahead.

THE BEGINNING OF MAY 2009
It is the rotation growing of vegetables in the three sacks that is my main interest – not only as information for those with limited space on a balcony or small patio, but also for the pleasure and interest of the blind.
To make good use of the compost soil in my three bags I planted radish seed in about one quarter of bags 1 (BEANS) and bag 3 (BRASSICAS) for an early crop They have made rather too much leaf, and thus taken up too much room. I have only harvested a few radishes so far. They were sliced and effectively added to a lettuce salad.
In bag 1 (BEANS), two dwarf courgettes and three dwarf French beans have established themselves well (having all been started in pots on my kitchen window sill). So, having bought a new packet of dwarf broad beans to replace those in a bucket that had either failed to germinate or been eaten by mice, I put three seeds in among the radishes to grow through and provide a crop later than those growing in buckets.
In bag 3 (BRASSICAS) The Swiss chard seedlings do well and will be thinned. Then, when radishes have flourished and been eaten, leek seedlings (doing well in a pot) will go in where the radishes grew.
In bag 2 (ROOTS) not all the early variety of potato (Swift) came into leaf at the same time. So at least three layers of compost were added to cover those early enough to push leaf upwards through each layer as it was added, and also on those as yet unseen. The interest now for this bag will be to see how productive will be the “pushy” potato plants as opposed to the “un-pushy” ones.
Carrot and beetroot seedlings do well in a pot. Some will be transplanted (with newly sown seed) into the 2 (ROOTS) sack after all the new potatoes have been harvested. Just when that will occur will depend, I am told, on when the potato plants start to produce flowers. So I may have to delve down to harvest the “pushy” new potatoes before the “un-pushy” ones. We will see when the time comes.
Everything else in the garden, as mentioned at the start of this piece, is doing well – except for the asparagus in a large pot. We should be harvesting one or two edible spears by this year, but none appeared, except for four seedlings that I planted, as seed, in the pot last autumn. I often wonder why more than one variety of a plant in a pot only produces one of those varieties successfully. Is there a fight beneath the soil where the strongest prevails?
There will be a future reports.

THE THIRD WEEK IN MAY 2009
I will abandon the growing of radishes in rotation sacks. They make too much greenery and not enough radish. They just take up too much room.
We harvested one bucket of new potatoes (Swift) by turning the bucket upside down on the garden table to harvest the spuds and return the compost to the bucket for Butternut Squash plants. Its four spent potato seeds were composted with their haulms (an action discouraged in the gardening world as it might propagate blight).
The crop was surprisingly good, giving a feast of new potatoes for two. But I will look for a tastier variety than Swift for next year.
So, growing potatoes in a bucket is a success. I will leave Swift potatoes in their ROOTS sack until later, to gain size and, I hope, taste.
Dwarf courgette and dwarf French bean plants do well in their BEANS sack.

FIRT WEEK OF JUNE 2009
We tipped out the second bucket of (Charlotte) potatoes. From its four seed potatoes we obtained 2 ½ pounds of splendid new potatoes. Half of them we boiled and, with melted butter, mint and a little vinegar, served them to guests in the bowl above their hot cooking water. Warm and buttery, and held by guests over paper napkins, they were a huge success.
So planting new potato seed in ordinary black plastic buckets (with crocks and drainage holes) is a real success story.
Having composted the radish from the BRASSICAS sack, I planted leek seedlings next to the young plants of Swiss chard.
I found that planting these young leeks deep in holes (made with the handle of a wooden kitchen spoon) was difficult because of their dangling roots. My sister (who knows about these things) told me to trim the roots with scissors and cut off the tips of the plants. This I have done, wondering if there will be any difference between “dangly” and “trimmed”.
` Now comes the most interesting part so far concerning my rotation sack experiments. Delving down through light compost to harvest new Swift potatoes, grown solely in my ROOTS sack, I was surprised to find, instead of a much larger crop than those grown in buckets, a much smaller one. And, as rather expected, more potatoes formed where compost had been added several times when green haulm showed through than where the seed potatoes had grown straight up through compost before green leaf ever emerged.
Elsewhere in the garden all proceeds as hoped for. Dwarf beans and squash plants do well in the buckets of soil previously used for growing new potatoes. Dwarf broad beans are flowering well, also in buckets. There are several pears and apples fruiting well. The Morello cherry crop is a small one. Lilies are about to flower. Lettuce, rocket, and sorrel leaves are harvested as wanted, and when a variety of lettuce is about to go to seed its stems have been composted and new seed planted in their place. Tomatoes grow well on a wall.
Main summer colour is provided, as always, by masses of busy lizzie flowers. Herbs do well, except for tarragon, which does not seem to like life in a pot. The pieris, Forest Flame (oh, what a wonderful small garden bush), changes its costume month by month. Two fuchsias come into flower to add colour. The lavender in a pot grew rather lopsidedly, but makes growth from its base and from the cuttings put in beside it in the spring. When it has flowered it will be cut right back. I should have been fiercer last autumn. The globe artichoke, grown in a pot for its leaf will be abandoned. As will the fennel plant.
A great success has been the campanula, ever since it was given to me as four plants and then crush-planted in a small trough. Each time it has flowered profusely and then been sheared right back. And after every cutting-back it has taken almost no time to grow more leaf and flower again.
I will add to this survey later in the summer.

FIRST WEEK IN JULY 2009

Although my crop rotation sacks do well, with French beans (courgettes and broad beans not so well) in one of them, good Swiss chard (White Silver) and leeks in another, and fine carrots and beetroot in the third (planted after the potato “crop”), I have come to the conclusion that next year the three rotation sacks will be abandoned in favour of six black plastic buckets with crocks and drainage holes. They will be more moveable, easier to handle, separating the crops and, for decorative purposes, will not necessarily need to be near to each other.
It is interesting to note that the plastic sacks were bought last year solely as sacks for growing potatoes, and were no good at it – those grown in buckets doing much better. I was not alone in being greatly disappointed in the sack method.
I learn that in medieval times rotation of crops had already been discovered to offer great benefits, but in a four-year rotation, with one being a fallow year.
Changes in the rest of my small garden have been the abandonment of strawberries in their elegant, open top clay pot with lipped holes in the side. The straggly strawberry plants have been replaced by ordinary pelargoniums (geraniums) in the open top, and trailing pelargoniums in the side holes. This has already become a colourful, central focal point. The strawberry crop was never much to speak of, and will not be missed.
I have bought more grow bags for their peaty compost filling, and found, when bringing them into the house that they fitted very snugly across the doorway, so might be ideal for house flood-protection should that ever be necessary.
My two-year-old jalapeno chilli plant started to form irregular-shaped chillies and will be abandoned (it recovered). It will be replaced with a chilli plant (of unknown parentage) bought at our local fête/dog show (this was abandoned).
I keep ginger root in a fruit bowl. Two of these lumps started to produce growth in the form of green spikes. So they have been planted in compost outside in a pot. Will they flourish?
A self-sown common foxglove was a great success, growing from a pot of pelargoniums. Bumblebees loved it, falling out of its flowers like drunken sailors out of a pub. After seed pods were formed in place of its flowers, I cut it into sections and attached these to vine wires above where I grow foxgloves on purpose – hoping that its seeds will dry, fall, and self-sow like its parent.
The mahonia that flowered and scented the garden in winter, formed clusters of blue berries. These have now all been eaten and enjoyed by blackbirds. The plant’s only drawback is its spiky leaves which, when fallen and dry, can penetrate the skin when handled.
Children love to watch our robin feeding on cheese bits from my knee. When living in the country I always grew a sensitive plant (mimosa pudica) to amuse child visitors. Touch the fern-like leaves and the plant reacts immediately by folding up its leaves tightly together. I must try to find a packet of its seeds, but I may be too late this year. Having grown it in the past in a lean-to greenhouse, will it grow outside in a London garden, I wonder?

MID AUGUST 2009

I was disappointed early in the year with the asparagus grown in a pot. But seedlings, possibly planted two years ago, have produced a fine crop of fronds. These have been tied to a centrally placed bamboo to forma whispy tree. So I have regained hope in harvesting a few token spears next year.
I was told that transplanted carrots would not do well. And they have not. Some did turn into stunted carrots with a bent-up root tip. Those planted from seed (after the potato failure) look well.
The new potatoes that did so well in black plastic buckets were replaced with French beans (fair, but not great) and butternut squash (making lots of flowers).
Soon after we ate our good but rather bland new potatoes, some early English-grown ones appeared in the market. These were delicious. They were Maris Bard. I will grow that variety next year. They even did well when slow-cooked in a stew, holding together well. They are of a nice oval shape with pure white flesh.
Lettuces, though satisfactory, have been replaced by rocket, which has already provided me with plenty of seed for next year.
As for those much-vaunted sacks, French beans and courgettes were a complete disappointment. Swiss chard has done well, though. And leeks might work.
The garlic and shallot crop, planted close together in garden soil, produced a poor harvest.
It is noticeable to every gardener that certain crops do well in some years and not in others. This must depend mainly on climatic conditions. So a failure this year might produce a success the next. It looks this way with my tomatoes (which caught the blight last year).
A kitchen window sill chilli plant (Naga), bought in Brick Lane (so favoured by the Bangladeshi community there) has grown into a fine looking mini-tree, and is covered with embryonic chillies. It looks, though, as if these might all mature at the same time, when one really wants a plant to provide a constant succession of chillies, like my jalapeno bush.
This year’s large crop of grapes mature unevenly.
The sensitive plant failed to germinate from seed outdoors, but has done so on the kitchen window sill.
Two ginger plants thrive in a pot outside, forming good spikes of leaves.

EARLY SEPTEMBER 2009
I usually cut vine leaves away to expose wine grape bunches to sunlight. This year I left a top hamper of leaves, partly in the hope that passing birds would not see the fruit, and partly because the compost bin was too full to cope with all the extra material.
Fusker the cat had reduced the pigeon count, as he is particularly partial to cornering them and extracting their feathers. Other major grape predators are starlings, of which there are few about this year. Even our robin (Hoverbird) has been grabbing a small red grape or two – with his expert hovering technique being ideal for the job of extracting a small ripe one from a hanging bunch – later to cough out the pip.
So the prospects of a good harvest were excellent, weather conditions throughout the spring and summer having clearly been ideal. And so it turned out to be.
From red grapes (Triomphe d’Alsace) in near perfect condition we made 5 gallons of must, which even showed signs of fermentation as we stripped the grapes from their stems. Our dunnock, for some reason, enjoyed the harvest, running around beneath us as we were cutting off bunches of grapes and filling fermentation bins.
The remainder of the grapes, consisting of the later-to-ripen white Seyval Blanc, Fragolino (Strawberry Grape) and a few still-ripening reds, should all blend well to make a good rosé at a later date.
Elsewhere, tomatoes flourish, as do salad leaves. Busy Lizzies have recovered from an unusual set-back, with the pink variety taking over from its companions of several colours.
The pot of asparagus continues to please me in its tied-in-tree-like form. Its flower buds are now in evidence, so we should get a later display of red berries.
We harvested our three pears, but not yet the fivet green apples – both from single-stemmed trees grown in pots.
I’m thinking of using those pretty useless potato sacks for climbing beans next year.

To Dieppe, 24 July 2009

2009-07-31T11:28:00.000+01:00

A few days before leaving for foreign parts one begins to think of what to take in the luggage, and to look at a list of “reminders”.
A glance before leaving this last time revealed, quite naturally, no mention of “teeth”. Had there been I might have taken more serious notice of a slight tooth ache that was being subdued by the application of neat TCP.
At the same time I should have connected the facts that, even to me, my breath smelled strange, and that I had a bad tooth.
A day before we were due to leave it felt as if the offending tooth was rising from its painful socket. Moreover, whenever I closed my jaw the protruding and painful wisdom tooth was the first to make contact with others.
We go to France to eat – among other things. So to be unable to enjoy French food without pain was a prospect not to be contemplated.
Margreet almost forced me to visit the dentist for an emergency appointment. She was absolutely right to do so. The tooth was extracted to my great relief.
Less one tooth (the first ever to have departed my jaw) we set off the following day for, unusually for us, a summer crossing of the Channel.
Because of the crowds of parents and children, coupled with the sea of rollers being funnelled into the Channel from the Bay of Biscay on a westerly wind, for Margreet to have booked a cabin was another piece of wisdom aforethought.
I write about Dieppe quite often, the changes over the years, the restaurants, people and history, because the town is really our second home in France – a home without the hassle of actually owning a house abroad.
We were last there barely four months ago. The changes in that short space of time were considerable for such an unchanging port. The recession had arrived. Shops (many) had closed and been re-opened by other hopefuls. Sales were in progress everywhere – and at the height of the holiday season. The place, mid-week, seemed to be only a little busier than in winter months.
The cancaillerie, where we bought Pro Ven Di soap, taps for our mother of vinegar jars, and accoutrements for winemaking and bottling, had closed for good.
Piles of scrap metal sat waiting on the dockside, waiting for times when steel would be more in demand – the gathering rust not making a lot of difference to its value. And on the quayside near to where the ferry pulls in to dock, the usual few piles of ballast were now enormous, with aggregates unwanted for building work.
And yet, a change of quite unnecessary expenditure was to be seen outside our favourite bar, the Café de la Paix, at the very hub of port and town activity. A monstrous bronze sculpture had been placed where before had been a hump roundabout. It depicts three mutilated women. Perhaps an awful disease had struck down the females of France in our absence and been commemorated. Or is it that, as I have been told, French men rather fancy crippled women. Who knows?
On the optimistic side, bars and restaurants were doing great business, like the New Haven, where it was necessary to book a table at week-ends or take a chance and arrive before 7 o’clock or after 9.
As a spectator sport, to see human kind and sheer efficiency of waiting and restaurant organisation, I can think of few places better to do it than at the Tout Va Bien Brasserie on a busy week-end evening or lunchtime.
On market day (Saturday), the main thoroughfare was packed with people and goodies. So there was certainly no sign of recession there.
And to relax after a good meal on a still summer’s evening, there are few more spectacular places for food to settle than to stand on the rounded seaside stones to watch an orange sun slide slowly into a deep blue sea, leaving behind a few coloured clouds. But in Dieppe it is often windy, and wet, too.
That dark blue sea must have been full of mackerel, because Maqueraux Mariné was on most menus. But scallops (the speciality for the seamen and diners of Dieppe), were resting safely on the sea bed, being out of season (15April – 15 October).
A bonus point on this visit was that a small booklet, called “The Taste of Dieppe”, was back, with its original author, Peter Avis, in command.
The booklet told us each year about where to eat and much more about the seaside town and its environs.
For some reason or other he had been no longer the author of it. Now he had regained his rightful place as a genuine informer of vital information for the interested tourist. Copies are available at no cost from the Tourist Information Office in the centre of town.

Wine Age

2009-07-16T17:15:00.001+01:00

We buy low priced Champagne in France and leave the bottles untouched for at least a year, if not several more. This modest laying down of wine works wonders with Champagne.
But, when celebrating something the other day, a bottle had slipped through the net and had become oxidised (loss of charm and a bit heavy, coarse). So the wine was turned into excellent Champagne cocktails (usually made with cheaper fizz) with the addition of sugar, Cognac, Angostura Bitters, and one drop only per glass of real vanilla essence – and ice.
So the subject of laying down wine surfaced.
Most wines nowadays are made to be drunk soon after being purchased. This means that they have been made quickly in stainless steel at minutely controlled temperatures, micro filtered and sulphured. Those with a high alcohol content will keep longer, but most might as well be drunk right away.
Wines that will improve by being laid down are distinguishable by their region (mainly Bordeaux and Burgundy in France), price (high), and cork.
Close inspection of the cork may tell you more about the wine than bottle shape, price or label. Wines that the producer considers to be worth ageing will use long (real) corks that will be branded with the maker’s name, château, and often date (classy white Burgundy is sometimes an exception, where unbranded corks and swapping can occur).
A bottle with a short cork, granular (agglomerated) or horrible plastic, will tell you that you might as well swill down the contents right away.
Laying down wines will have been made with longer contact between juice, pips and skins, rested in oak barrels, and barely filtered, if at all. This all costs money and people’s time – hence the cost. The reds will contain raw tannins that pucker the mouth.
So, for how long should you lay down these wines, and in what conditions?
The conditions do not matter a great deal – whatever you are told to the contrary. I have kept wine for years in many places and conditions, but have never allowed the temperature in which they have been kept to rise or fall quickly.
In February 1968 I imported a hogshead of Bilbainas Rioja from Spain and bottled its contents – 350 bottles when I lived in London’s dockland. It may already have had up to 4 years in cask. Cellar book comments that I made in ’69, ’70, ’73 and ’77 all note that the wine, delicious when bottled, improved splendidly. At 10 years in bottle it was as good a wine as first class claret. For its second 10 years it remained a good wine but faded away slowly.
In 1968 I bought 8 dozen Château Cantenac Brown 1959 from J. Lyons Wine Cellars at the Hop Exchange, London, where all bottles were returned to be cleaned, filled again, and labelled by a little old lady with glue paste and brush. (She also labelled cheap Hock with grand labels for royalty.)
The wine was the best I can ever recall having tasted. Tested for note-taking in ’68, ’70 and ’72, it was still wonderful and with years in hand. In 1979 (20 years old) it was “…still a good glass…” But in 1993 (32 years old), commenting on the very last bottle, it was “…way beyond its wonderful self, still smelling nice and with good initial taste, but a lost finish”. I added to the note: ”Farewell dear old friend”.
These wines were part of my wine learning curve, and before many of the modern style wines entered the market.
Serious laying down of wines has now mainly become a rich person’s game. But it is worth an experimental try by buying a few bottles of the same wine and making notes when consuming one of them each year.
I have seen Australian reds, and especially whites, improve with bottle age, but mainly before they started to ape the lighter wines of Europe. It would be well worth the experiment of keeping some full flavoured and alcohol-ridden wines from both new and old worlds.
I count myself most lucky to have lived through and been interested in this product of the grape in an age (certainly the 1960s) when good claret was still a modestly-priced, everyday wine.
The choice of wines presently available is huge and wonderful. There must be plenty that won’t break the bank and be worth testing over time.

Potato Pancakes

2009-07-13T17:53:00.000+01:00

A Jewish method is one of the quickest, easiest, most economical and delicious ways of cooking potatoes. So the recipe is very useful if you have reached home late, nothing is immediately available to eat, and you are hungry. Use these potato pancakes on their own, with other vegetables, with fried eggs, bacon, chops, hamburgers, cold meats, corned beef or fish fingers, etc.

POTATOES - POTATO PANCAKES

For these you will need:
Potatoes
Pepper and salt
Oil, dripping or oil and butter
Onion (optional)
Cheese (optional)
Egg (optional)
Nutmeg (optional)

Heat a generous quantity of olive oil, cooking oil, or a mixture of oil and butter in a frying pan. Now, on to a plate or into a bowl grate well-washed potatoes. It is not necessary to peel them. Add pepper and salt, and a little grated onion if desired. Do not at this stage delay or the potatoes will discolour.
Spoon the mixture into the hot oil and flatten into small, thin pancakes. Make absolutely sure that each is separated from its neighbours. Cook until brown beneath and then turn them over until glowing brown on both sides. Drain the oil from each and, if thought necessary, place on kitchen paper to drain further.
Some grate the potatoes into a bowl and add salt, later squeezing out the moisture before dealing with them. Others grate cheese into the bowl before adding an egg and the grated potato. Nutmeg is sometimes added to these pancakes.
Serve with what you will.

*****

The following is, like the pancake recipe above, simple to make, and delicious to eat with drinks.

POTATOES – POTATO PANCAKE FOR DRINKS

You will need:
An egg
Grated cheese
Olive oil
Pepper and salt
Flour (plain or self-raising)
Tabasco (optional)
Dijon mustard (optional)
A grated potato

Into a bowl break an egg. Add a little water and whisk. Now add half that volume of plain or self-raising flour. Whisk again. Now add half the present volume of grated cheese (any). Put in some milled pepper and salt. Add a little Dijon mustard and a shake of Tabasco, if they are at hand. Now grate in a peeled, medium-sized potato.
Mix what you have together and put it into a frying pan containing hot olive oil. Flatten it out with a spatula and turn down the heat to its lowest. When the underside is glowingly brown, toss or turn the pancake. Cook until quite done – about 20 to 25 minutes in all.
Place the pancake on to a board and cut it into small squares. Eat the morsels when hot.

2009-07-04T13:44:00.001+01:00

2009-07-04T13:41:00.000+01:00

Meat Loaf

2009-06-18T17:05:00.001+01:00

My first experiences of eating meat loaf were in America early in the war when I was a refugee and not yet old enough to join the RAF. Those experiences were not happy ones.
My kind hosts ate meat loaf about once a week, cooking a rather solid lump of compressed, baked mince.
When I found myself with some frozen minced steak, and wondering what stroke of genius I might apply to it, meat loaf came to mind. Would it be possible to form a recipe that might become a regular and delicious dish for the house menu’s repertoire?
What turned out was quite delicious when hot, but very dull when cold. So the problem was not so much about how to make meat loaf as how to use it up when cold.
Frying it crumbled with mashed potato was not at all bad.
Frying thick slices in flour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs turned out to be a splendid way, and delicious.
Cooked rather as one would use corned beef in a hash proved to be excellent – especially when the taste of caraway seeds came to the fore.
My sister, who had been to the dentist for an extraction and was advised not to chew solid food for a while, found that the meat loaf melted in the mouth.
And my last experiment was to turn thick slices into a mousseau – by resting them in a vinaigrette with added chopped onion, capers, chopped cornichons, pickled peppercorns and chilli.

MEAT LOAF

You will need:
Minced beef
Butter
Bread crumbs
Pepper and salt
Dried herbs and spices with which you feel happy (I used oregano, paprika and turmeric for colour, methi leaves, chilli, celery salt, dill, thyme, caraway seeds and Dijon mustard). The choice was made only because they happened to be handy at the time.
Eggs
Milk
Ice

Grease a bread tin and, if you feel like it, line the bottom and sides with something like Parma/Serrano ham or bacon.
Into a large bowl put minced meat (it does not have to be beef. It could be a mixture of minced meats. Add half its volume of breadcrumbs (the bread I make crumbles well, but crumbled crumb from a drying sliced loaf would be fine).
Add dried herbs, with a little turmeric and much more paprika - both for colour. Add a dollop of Dijon mustard, pepper (milled if possible) and salt.
Now add beaten egg (probably two). Stir it well. I start with a spoon and then use the hands. You may need to moisten it all with milk - to form a soft paste.
Place the mixture in the bread tin and flatten it.
Now, apart, press into the heart of the mixture two lumps of ice (about the size of small walnuts). Cover them over. These will keep the loaf moist.
Bake the meat loaf for about two hours in a medium oven - with foil on top to keep in the moisture.
When cooked, turn it out on to a board. Slice it, to be eaten with mashed potato or pasta.
This is a very economical dish.

Note:
Making a meat loaf happens to be a giant leap toward making a splendid Paté/terrine. Just substitute minced fat pork and liver for the breadcrumbs. Use thyme, or something else, instead of the herbal mixture, and moisten with a spirit instead of milk and ice cubes. I bake it in a bain-marie (tray of water) uncovered. This is a great dish for a party.

Age

2009-06-14T14:54:00.001+01:00

I have been watching cricket at Lord’s ground with two friends. One complained that I had not written a blog recently, except for an update on growing vegetables in pots for those with little space and for the blind (sorry, but I have been on a roll with painting). And they both, I feel, are curious about the vigour of someone of my age (84) and are pleased to see me still alive each year.
I still run to catch a bus (with a rather stiff and creaky gait it is true), am artistically productive and imaginative as I have ever been, do all the cooking in the house, write, and enjoy life to the full. Having written a lot on wine, the drinking of it remains a great pleasure and, in the process, absorbing much healthy goodness from it.
As I think of these matters, it must be stressed that I am an extremely lucky person and, I suppose, possessed of an easy-going nature.
A matter that has been much in my favour has been the ability to chop and change careers, with one leading seamlessly to another. This successful switching depends mainly on having a creative mind.
From schooling (what there was of it) I became a pilot. And when the war ended I started in medicine (scotched by TB), stage designer, landscape artist, traveller and illustrator, sculptor, writer of books and articles, and back to being a painter – with lots of little bits in between.
And all along I have brought up children, run gardens, run houses, cooked for all and sundry, as well as creating two small, experimental vineyards.
And I have been lucky with marriages. In the first I was expected (and delighted) to run the home and family as my then wife fought for fame and fortune, and for the second I found myself with an absolutely lovely person.
I was born (1925) at just the right time. I remember the great depression (which has left me with a sense of parsimony) and how to live through it in the country, where we grew our own food and learned country ways and lore.
In my most virile years, contraception was beginning to be mastered and venereal disease temporarily conquered.
My life at that time might now be termed promiscuous, but it wasn’t. One simply went to bed with girls as a nice way of getting to know them. That was the way of it. I had what others called my mini-marriages.
My sex life has continued unabated, though recently declining with age – Viagra having extended it.
Of course, being my age means that health issues have come and gone. As a young man I had TB, which returned later when I was a medical student. Cure had to be left to nature, which didn’t work for many, but did for me – there being no remedy at that time. And in my later years I had prostate cancer (cured by radiotherapy), heart disease (cured by pills, with digitalis once being the key to success), and one eye going phut.
Since being left to look after myself in a country cottage during school holidays I learned not to be afraid of the dark, to walk silently, and to cook – a skill that continues, with hardly a dish repeated in favour of experiments. Exceptional successes are added to my sizeable computer-held cookbook, to accompany the best from my two published cookbooks.
Besides writing a blog, which is mainly on cooking and travel, I continue with an autobiography, started many years ago when I began writing and had capacity beyond a weekly column and still a good and fresh memory to rely on.
My paintings, done in the 1950s and 1960s sell at Christie’s – sometimes for a lot – and my recent work in bold pastel have started to sell well – mainly through the internet. With these I consider that I am not greedy, with postcard size at £50, up to A4 size at £195 - £250, and A1 at £1,950 – all with reductions for friends and family.
I take less pleasure from travel, hating airports, and great pleasure from my small London garden and the birds who use it (a robin eats from my knee).
So I say to my Lord’s friends: here is a new blog, and being 84 is wonderful (fingers crossed).

2009-05-09T16:40:00.000+01:00

Hulls 2009 from Series Ship Shapes

2009-05-08T21:18:00.000+01:00

Ship Shapes

2009-05-08T10:42:00.000+01:00

Endive and avocado salad

2009-05-04T11:37:00.000+01:00

I often wonder why endive (chicory) should be so expensive in England and so cheap in France. So on our mini breaks in Dieppe (usually to buy wine and eat well for a few days) we bring back a quantity of this crisp, blanched vegetable. A popular dish is to wrap ham around a piece and braise it. I like to dip the pieces into a variable vinaigrette mixture and eat it that way. This salad method of using endive maintains its crunch and adds another flavour and texture. It looks nice, too.

ENDIVE AND AVOCADO SALAD

You will need:
Endive
Avocado
Vinaigrette

Make a vinaigrette in a bowl, using oil, vinegar (or lemon or lime juice), salt, pepper, and a little icing sugar, and possibly dry English mustard, Dijon mustard, or horseradish. Mix it well.
Cut across the endive(s) and add the pieces to the vinaigrette. Toss it all around.
Put the coated endive on plates or in bowls, and on the top place slices of peeled avocado.