Hallowe'en and other things

Hallowe’en is coming up. Normally this would be of little interest – now we live in a gated community (a block of flats) we don’t have to concern ourselves with trick or treaters. This is a relief because I can’t manage to be polite about it, even when quite young children are involved. As far as I’m concerned, it’s demanding money with menaces and it’s wrong. I blame E.T. However, number three son runs a fancy dress shop, well, two, to be precise, and this is their busiest time of year. So busy, in fact, that I helped. I am a bit dim - you need a thorough knowledge of popular culture to succeed in this business, and I haven’t got it.

“Have you got the black outfit that Sandy wears at the end of Grease?” Wouldn’t know what you are talking about, I’ve never seen Grease.

“It’s  nineties party. What have you got?”  Surely the nineties were just last week. Haven’t a clue who was famous then.

I am quite good on Marvel superheroes.  Watching Only Connect, on BBC4, I’ve only once got the connection between four things after only one has been given, and I’m sorry to say the connection was that the four things all turned someone into a superhero. Sad, I know.

Also, I’m not sure whether I’m nice enough. I find it really hard to be patient with clueless or disrespectful people. Actually hardly anyone in the fancy dress shop is rude, but a quite a lot have absolutely no imagination. Or too much – one of the really frustrating things, fortunately not that common, is when a woman wants to be Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or My Fair Lady, or try on one of the Marilyn Monroe dresses. When they have them on, they look in the mirror, realise that the dress doesn’t automatically make them look as good as Hepburn or Monroe, and then it’s YOUR fault.

The most popular look this year seems to be Jimmy Saville. We’ve had to do a rush order for more long blond wigs. At one time, Osama Bin Laden was the favourite bogy man, then Colonel Gaddafi, now it’s a paedophile DJ.

After my father died my mother supported us by running an off licence. This was much harder work than the fancy dress shop as it was open for such long hours, and quite a lot of customers had drink on board, which didn’t make them nicer people. But my mother could almost always see the good in people and even when she didn’t like people, she could usually be much kinder than I could have been. She always had a lame duck she was doing her best for, often several of them, and she was able to see the humour in situations. For example the local catholic priest used to go into her shop regularly to buy a bottle of whisky. I think he felt he shouldn’t be doing so – why, I don’t know, because the church doesn’t seem to frown on alcohol. He would always sidle in during a quiet period, hat pulled down and collar turned up, and my mother would amuse herself by humming the Harry Lime theme.

The best story about my mother’s time in her shop, was the one about the well known prostitute, who arrived in the shop and bought some tights, and then said,  “Can I come into the back room and put them on? My shoes are making my feet sore without any.”

Obviously, my mother wasn’t too keen, but said alright, and then went in to the back room to keep an eye on her. To my mother’s surprise, she turned out to be stark naked apart from her coat; and with great perspicacity my mother said, “You’ve got nothing on!”

Her customer embarked on a long and convoluted tale of trouble aboard a ship in the docks. “When that happens, you have to get off quick – you could end up in the water and no one any the wiser until the ship’s left.” The story ended with money being snatched, and the customer shouting indignantly, “Hey, none of that! If you f…… you pay for it!”

Hearing my mother tell the story I was fascinated, and asked what she had replied. My mother said, proudly, “I said, And quite right too!”

Baking the Christmas cake

It’s nearly October half term so I’ve been making Christmas cakes and puddings. That’s my traditional date, ever since I started to make myown. For the first couple of years we were married, my mother used to make us a cake, and then I started to feel guilty because really, she had enough to do. But I use her recipe, which goes back to my great grandmother Nock – my mother’s mother’s mother. It involves one and a half pounds of butter and a dozen eggs. I cut it back to one pound of butter, which still makes a very substantial cake.

I remember my gran making the cakes and puddings. The currants had to be picked over for twiggy bits and then washed, and then, to make sure they didn’t sink, they were dried in bowls in front of the coal fire all day, being turned over by hand regularly. So even getting the currants ready for use was a major task. The almonds were put into a bowl and boiling water poured over and then when the water had cooled, they were slipped out of their brown skins. After  that, they were chopped. When I first started making my own cake, I felt I ought to buy almonds in their skins and do the hot water bit, but after a lot of years, I decided that nostalgia is all very well, but you can indulge in it too much. So now I buy the almonds already skinned. Actually, the chopping takes ages because you don’t want the pieces too small, so it has to be done almond by almond – no food processing. 

My granny used to have to chop the mixed peel, too. Of course nowadays, one uses mixed peel and currants straight from the packet. You have to add a little mace, and it can be quite hard to find nowadays. It isn’t a fashionable spice. How you can make a béchamel without mace beats me, though. Probably everyone’s too busy making Thai curries badly, instead of traditional British food well.

I do use the food processor for beating the sugar and butter and the eggs. My gran used to do it all by hand with a wooden spoon, in a very big earthenware bowl, just like the ones they have in National Trust dairies.  It’s jolly hard work – we all used to take a hand, although I don’t know how much help I was really.  We all got to make a wish with the puddings. I tried to get the kids to have a stir and make a wish on our pudding when they were young, but it didn’t really take – I’m not sure they make a wish on cutting birthday cakes any more, even. Perhaps they are all too cynical, or too scientific, to believe in wishes any more. I remember making a wish on the first star at night, and the new moon, and avoiding seeing the new moon through glass, throwing spilt salt over my shoulder, and loads of other superstitious stuff that the kids have never done. I’m not sure if it’s good that they aren’t superstitious, or whether they’ve missed some sort of folk culture.

I digress. After all the chopping and mixing and beating, the mixture is put into a well buttered and lined cake tin which is still marked  on the bottom “2 shillings and 7 pence”, and cooked in a slow oven for about 8 to 10 hours. (My modern oven switches itself off after about seven hours – it seems to think it knows better than I do. I know about this now, but it still makes me swear.)  As soon as it comes out of the oven, I pour several generous slugs of brown rum over it, and the smell is out of this world. If it doesn’t make your mouth water, you’re probably dead.

Then the cake is wrapped up and put away until Christmas Eve, when it is covered with marzipan (NO white icing!) and decorated with marzipan balls, glace cherries, a Father Christmas driving a sled which predates me, a robin made by my daughter out of Fimo, and a plaque saying “Merry Christmas” which came from Sainsbury’s about twenty years ago. Then it’s served with proper Wensleydale, brought from North Yorkshire.  Merry Christmas! 

Trollope and TV

We’ve spent a lot of time reading Trollope’s series of political novels, six of them all told, although I rather resorted to speed reading for the last two, which were weaker, in my opinion. I enjoyed many of the characters and particularly enjoyed the many different versions of courtship and marriage which Trollope describes.  It really does bring home to you that women were totally in men’s power – even rich ones had little independence, thanks to the pressures of society, and were at terrible risk of being married to bad men who were only interested in their money.

There’s every sort of marriage described – arranged marriages which turn out well, or turn out badly, marriages for love which turn sour, marriages for money and status which turn even more sour – and heavens, do the women who make a bad choice suffer! And to be fair, so do a few of the men.

I had a vague memory of these books being serialised for the BBC as “The Pallisers”, so I looked it up on Amazon, and found that yes, it was available but at a ridiculous price. Anyway, Phil found the whole set of four boxes of DVDs in the library, so we borrowed the first set and started watching. It’s been quite a task as there are, as I said, 4 boxes and 26 hour long episodes. As they are lent for only a week, we’ve had to maintain productivity – one day we had to watch an episode while we ate our lunch!

It was on TV in 1974, when we didn’t actually own a set, and it is filmed at a length and breadth of detail that I am sure could never be repeated nowadays. The books were adapted by Simon Raven, who has made the most of Trollope’s witticisms and added plenty of his own. And the costumes are just magnificent, and as far as I can see, strictly accurate. Again, I don’t think it could ever be repeated nowadays.  They’d never dare to put modern actresses in those desperately ugly hair styles and headgear that they wore in the earlier part of Victoria’s reign. They even have the courage to put quite big little boys in frocks, and some of the men have the sort of facial hair in which you expect to see the odd nest.

Another enjoyment has been spotting actors and actresses, once well known, and wondering if they are still alive. Wikipedia has taken a pounding. “Oh look it’s him / her!”  we exclaim, and then try to remember their name and what else they were in.  It’s kept us happily occupied for hours and hours.

I’ll have to see what other treasures the library possesses. “Poldark”, do you think?

Post Feminism?

The blog has been neglected for some time. The reason for this is that my husband has been ill.  He was quite clearly feeling awful, and was cold all the time, which is so unlike him. Usually, just as I start to feel warm enough, he announces that he’s too hot, and puts the heating off. Also he has lots of aches and pains. So my imagination was running riot, and the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis  was actually a relief. However, this does not mean he’s actually any better, it’s just that we’re both less worried. Which is something.

Anyway, the carpe diem list has suffered. Not that it was ever meant to be a burden or that I intended to get all competitive over it! But I have done one thing – I’ve started to volunteer, just one afternoon a week, at a charity bookshop. The idea was that I would feel I’m contributing in a small way and it wouldn’t be at all stressful or emotionally demanding. Also I’d be doing something a little different and perhaps meeting different people. The job has met all these criteria, and so far I’ve managed to be firm and not bring any books home, which of course is the worry. The price of staying decluttered is eternal vigilance. There are some very tempting books, too. There are insane numbers of knitting books, by which I’m not in the least tempted. I’m a lousy knitter – I did crack it sufficiently to knit a few plain jumpers for the children, but usually by the time I’d finished it, it fitted the next child down to the one it had been intended for. Also, I couldn’t knit and watch TV and if you can’t do that, knitting is really boring.

So this post is really inspired by the fact that there are builders working down the road. They’ve been there for weeks and I’ve never seen them speak to a girl going past. Now, I expect them to ignore a woman of my age, but when I was young, you could never have walked past a building site without whistles and calls. Lorry drivers sounded their horn and waved as they went past. Strangers stared. Middle class ones didn’t comment, others often did. I remember a trip to pick my mother up when she arrived at King’s Cross; it was summer and I was wearing a sleeveless top, and before long my mother was getting really cross with me about the attention I was attracting! 

Life is really different now. No man would behave like that any more and no woman would accept it, as we did. I think even we saw it as “just a bit of fun”. I always disliked being called “dear” by a strange man. “Love” or “blossom” or “hinny” or “me duck” seemed fine, but there was something deeply patronising about “dear”. It used to make me furious. The only other time I remember being really cross was when a totally strange man patted my bottom at a party. I was talking to someone and he was just walking past. That time I was cross enough to pour a glass of wine over his head.  So things have really changed for the better. This is not to say there isn’t still a long way for women to go.

Actually, the modern phenomenon that makes me foam at the mouth with fury is the way mothers treat their girls. Pink, pink pink. They even go out and buy pink pushchairs. The phrase “little princess” ought to get you sent to a re-education camp for a week, where you can learn that becoming a surgeon or astrophysicist are suitable ambitions for little girls, and that dressing them from head to toe in pink, and telling them they are beautiful little princesses, will not help them succeed. 

“Pampering” – now that’s another word that makes me furious. Pampering is what happens to lap dogs who have short and unhappy lives. Grown women do not need pampering, for God’s sake. In spite of the distance we’ve come, there’s still a lot to do, and I really don’t think we need to hold ourselves back.

Summer is over

Summer is over and I have my usual melancholy - another year over. I used to absolutely hate the kids going back to school. Some mums couldn't wait for term to start, whereas I always felt like weeping. Still, lots to look forward to, mustn't get gloomy. Christmas stuff in the shops already.

I’ve been a bit too busy to blog recently, and as I felt I hadn’t been making too much progress with my carpe diem list, I didn’t really have the inclination. However, when I took stock, I have actually done a couple of the things on the list. So here goes:

I got out my mother’s old oak wooden bowl, sanded and sanded, wire wooled and wire wooled (messy), and finally varnished it. It looks great. I don’t know quite why I bothered, because there’s nothing special about it, and my mother was never fond of it (“Well, it was war time, there wasn’t much you could get for wedding presents.”) But I’ve always felt it was a pleasing shape, and it is a good big chunk of English oak. So mending or restoring something was on the list, and it was right that it was, because the end result was very satisfying.

One thing was to attend a sporting event. I’ve half done that – we went to see the Tour of Britain start from the Castle this morning. We saw Wiggins and Cavendish, which was exciting, but I’m not going to tick it off, because really the Castle is so close it would have been pathetic not to go, and also the crowds were such that I really didn’t see very much. 

Then we went to London, to the National Theatre to see Timon of Athens. This is part of our ambition to see every Shakespeare play on stage.  So although Phil has torn the meniscus in his knee, and can’t walk very far, we had a lovely day. The River Festival was on so there was lots of added value in the form of acrobats and barge racing. London looked marvellous, as always, but the tube seemed much cleaner than it used to be. The streets have been clean for ages, but there was a definite difference with the tube. Also there are people walking along the foreshore of the Thames at low tide – we remember it being thickly covered with black smelly sludge. So all that was great.

One can see why Timon is a lesser performed play. The language isn’t generally as gripping, although Timon has a couple of enormously powerful  speeches.   The production made use of imagery of the City and the Occupy movement, and that worked well. I did admire Simon Russell Beale’s movement and body language when he was reduced to a down and out. It was creepy, and somewhat guilt inducing, to recognise the shaky run, the lack of social inhibition, and the shuffling, poorly coordinated movement that you see in street people.  I don’t know how he managed it, but somehow Russell Beale made you see that Timon’s insane generosity when he is rich is because he believes that he is unlovable. So his rejection of everything afterwards makes  sense. So more moving than I expected, and we’re glad we went.

A week in Whitby

I’ve been staying in Whitby, with my husband, the two grandsons and, for part of the week, our middle son, who is amazingly patient with the little boys and very good at distracting them and calming situations. He’ll make a terrific dad, I hope.

Whitby is an excellent holiday spot, but there are considerable contrasts to Swanage. Swanage is definitely more sophisticated, and groomed, whereas even quite smart places here are somehow brasher and in your face. Of course, there are lots of pretty rough establishments too, with bouncers in the evening. 

Beach huts in Whitby

The little boys loved the beach. It is actually a beautiful beach, smooth, firm sand with sweeping tides, so very clean, and just a few good big rock pools at one end. They played defending a castle from the tide – they’d never done it before and had the most tremendous fun. One thing we did notice is the size of the earthworks (“sand castle” just doesn’t do them justice.) People arrive on the beach equipped with garden spades; I was quite envious, especially since Phil kept pointing out how much bigger other people’s castles were. I only managed a bit of a swim because we had to keep an eye on the boys jumping the waves. On the phone to his mum, the older grandson was squeaking "I went in the sea and it was really rough and I was all on my own and the waves were going right over my head and I was all on my own and it was really rough" etc. etc. I had to take the phone and say that it wasn't quite like that, or she'd have been leaping in the car to come and rescue him. 

The other thing the boys really enjoyed was the port and the boats, and the 199 steps. We avoided mention of Dracula as much as possible. We didn’t want nightmares! There are loads of alternative shops – folk instruments and music, straightforward Goth, ironic Goth (sundresses printed with pink and blue skulls) proper antique, vintage, fossils and shells, gifts of all kinds, as well as the jet and jewellery shops.

So now we’re home and our son in law has the week off to look after the boys, so we are having a rest! But we’d definitely do it again.

The Olympics

I’ve been watching the Olympics on television rather obsessively. I did try for tickets but didn’t get any in the first round and then was so fed up with the system I didn’t try again. In any case, Phil was very negative about the idea of the London Olympics, and he is not keen on sport in the first place, so I couldn’t help losing heart. I’m sorry now, because the whole thing looked great – London and the Olympic Park looked marvellous, it all seemed to be very well done, and I won’t get another chance, after all.  Everyone I know who went has said how well organised it was, with lots of added value things like dance performances and explanations of how minority sports work.

Rhythmic gymnastics is a “sport” I thought was pointless, but I began to respect it – I still think the whole thing is a ludicrous endeavour, unless you want to be a circus performer, but the things they can do with their bodies! Similarly with synchronised swimming – it’s the most ridiculous thing, but you know how hard it would be to do anything similar, so you have to respect the swimmers even when wearing full eye make in the pool.

Sports I didn’t come round to are water polo – what’s the point of that? – and Taekwondo. They keep trying to kick their opponent, missing, and falling over. How would that work in a real fight, without a referee to stop your opponent? It’s just stupid. I’ve never been keen on basketball – there’s too many goals and hence, no tension. Handball seemed rather similar. I should think that they are both far more fun to play than watch. 

I had very mixed feelings about the dressage – I admire the horses and the training that has gone into it, but do they have to demean the horse by doing it to terrible arrangements of cheesy music?

I liked all the brilliant colour schemes. It didn’t look nationalistic, more welcoming. I liked the opening ceremony. If you knew absolutely nothing about British history, maybe it would have been confusing, but I think if you were reasonably quick on the uptake, you would have learned quite a lot about Britain. The forging of the Olympic rings and the whole lighting of the cauldron bit, with the young athletes and the”petal”  for every nation,  were exceptionally good. Just put McCartney out to grass please.

The closing ceremony, not so good. Some of the songs were a bt obscure and there weren’t enough sing along ones. You could see how much the athletes enjoyed it when they could. The LED lights round the stadium made a wonderful show. The highlight was Annie Lennox. We were simply staring at the screen in bemusement and we’re British. I thought it had to be a celebration of Whitby Goth weeks, someone else suggested that it was a memorial to the slave trade – it was weird, we all were giggling helplessly, and the commentators clearly had no idea either. Eventually (far too late) they identified the song as being from a Dracula film, which meant that my “celebration of Whitby Goth week” was not so far out. So why on earth did she choose that one? Was it something about celebrating Britain’s literary heritage – something the organisers of both ceremonies seem keen on? It was plain daft, and it will certainly be difficult for Rio de Janeiro to top that.

Through both ceremonies, I did like the determined Britishness, and to hell with anyone else’s over sensibilities. So sod the Pakistani and Saudi ideas about modest dress, sod American ideas about racial mixing and religion, sod the Russians and the Chinese and the Saudis and many others – let’s have paeons to personal freedom. Good stuff!

There are pervading stereotypes of the British as being buttoned up and inhibited. Having travelled around a bit, it seems to me that the British place a high value on privacy, but are much better at letting their hair down and enjoying themselves than, say, the Americans, and much less inhibited by worries about “face” than, say, the French. I hope the Olympics have shown this side of us to the world. And we are dreadful grumblers and very keen to put ourselves down, so maybe they have shown an efficiency and competence, that we didn’t know we had, to ourselves.