Thursday 10 September 2020

Grandpa's Birthday

They say women marry men who are like their father. I can't say this has been obvious to me in the past but it might be possible; I need to consider this a bit more. The thought crossed my mind the other day that Bill was a lot like Grandpa: kind, patient, a tinkerer, someone who loves good, well made clothes for a very long time, sociable, a do-er more than a thinker.




Grandpa's father was a blacksmith. I remember reading or hearing somewhere that blacksmiths had an important position in their community, in part because they tended to be quite strong men who mastered fire and metal, but mainly because they were the makers of the tools that all the other craftspeople relied upon having. They were also frequently the repair shop for many household goods.  Not to mention that horses were the made mode of transport of their day and they were the source of horseshoes. The 1880 census says that Grandpa's father was a plough smith, so he was supporting the source of food. The 1900 census tells us he was now called a blacksmith, also that he immigrated from Germany in 1868, at the age of 27. He was 53 and his wife, Catherine 40, when Grandpa was born.

Grandpa's mother died when he was 11, in 1905, and his father when he was 17, in 1911 (and I thought I was young when mine died: 32 and 34). He was the youngest of eight children.  Three of Grandpa's siblings died before he was born: a girl aged one, another girl aged 16 (along with her twin babies) and a boy aged three. The rest of the family reached maturity. The last to die was Grandpa's eldest brother, John, who predeceased Grandpa by 10 years. I was seven years old when John died and I remember Grandpa being very sad. He said the John had largely raised him. 

I always count myself very lucky to have had Grandpa in my life. He is still one of the best men I've ever known.





Saturday 15 August 2020

Mom's Birthday

I've spent some time wondering what I might write about Mom this year. I feel I'm overlooking something that would be obvious had the world not gotten so weird of late, but there it is. Then I remembered a Facebook meme sent by my friend, Vivien. 



My reply was that either this was addressed to younger people or it was a British more than American thing. I could only identify a few things I remembered Mom as saying, and quite I few I couldn't even imagine her ever coming up with.  She may have said "Because I said so" or "Ask your Dad", I'm sure she said the thing about taking someone's eye out. 

Were you born in a barn?  This is a saying that circulated in the US not long before Mom died. She would have said "Shelley! Mind your manners. When ____ we do ____.

Move away from the TV, you'll get square eyes. She may have said I would hurt my eyes, but 'square eyes' wasn't mentioned. She often encouraged me to 'sit up straight'.

You wait until your Dad gets home. Mom was the primary disciplinarian in our house. She may have said something like Your father will not be impressed with this.

Who's SHE? the cat's mother? I think this is quite British. I gather - reading between the lines - that it's considered rude to refer to someone as 'she' if they are present. I am guessing they are supposed to always be referred to by name. No idea if this also applies to He. 

Do as I say not as I do. I think Mom may have said this a couple of times, but more along the lines of sheepishly acknowledging she didn't set a good example than to issue orders.

Eat your crusts, you'll get curly hair.  I'm not sure if this is a stick (that curly hair is bad) or a carrot (that curly hair is desirable). In any case, I've always liked bread crusts - in fact they are my favourite part - and I spent a good part of my childhood in hair curlers.

There is no such word as CAN'T  I don't believe she said this, but rather "You won't know unless you try."

Say 'Pardon', not 'What'  Pardon would have been considered an affectation where and when I grew up. She would have instructed me to say 'Excuse me? I didn't catch what you said'. I gather from various reading that here in Britain 'Pardon' is working class or perhaps regional (Bill's daughter Helen says it since marrying a man from Manchester). As I recall people here seem to say 'Sorry' for when they can't hear or when they bump into people. 'Excuse me' seems to be used when they want someone to most out of their way. We say that for the same purpose in the States, only followed by 'please'.

I've told you a thousand times   I'm sure Mom must have said this - doesn't every parent? - but I can't remember her saying it. She might ask me 'What have I said about...?'

What did your last slave die of? Mom didn't employ sarcasm, she was just straightforward. I do remember the first time she said 'Get it yourself'. I thought I'd die of shock, but at 12 years of age it was long overdue.

I want never gets  Not an American saying. However, I was definitely taught not to ask for things. I could say what I would like to have in a general way, or issue a wish list for Christmas or Birthdays, but not to whine and wheedle to my parents all the time - that was the surest way NOT to get something. And it was supremely bad manners to ask anyone else to give me anything; they had to offer first. When we were in funds I was allowed to chose one treat at the supermarket and I remember eating a basket of cherry tomatoes or a bag of cherries in the back seat on the way home. I expect I could have had candy, but I didn't like it nearly as much, which is very much down to the way they raised me. Being taught not to ask for things has sometimes proven to be a handicap. I have wondered, would  they would have trained a boy in the same way?

Back in my day... Mom's childhood was different - and in some ways far more privileged - than mine. Her father's family was well known and respected in southern Oklahoma. Her father was a road contractor and she and Grandmother travelled with him for at least the first five years of Mom's life - they lived in a tent until then. This sounds hard but they had servants AKA as 'coloured help'. I often heard about Gussie, who brought Mom a chocolate bar and a bottle of Coca Cola for her breakfast in bed. She said Gussie spoiled her. There were times when they were quite poor, but everyone was during the Depression. When Grandmother married a second time to an astute businessman Mom had quite a few luxuries again. But I always understood Mom made her own luxuries through her creative talents. I don't remember complaining about having it hard, because she was so clever about making things pretty or special in a way that other kids' Mom's didn't seem to know how to do. 

What's for dinner, mum? Shit with sugar on. Mom didn't swear beyond 'damn' or 'hell' and only then when really annoyed. She did sometimes fix S.O.S. which in military parlance was 'Shit On a Shingle' (meat in white sauce on bread). She never called it anything other than 'chipped beef on bread'.

No pudding unless you eat your dinner We rarely had pudding - dessert - and I don't expect there were many times I didn't eat my dinner; a lot of the time I asked for seconds. The only time we routinely had dessert was at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes she did make pudding (AKA custard in Britain) for a snack or a treat, but not as part of a meal.

If your mate asked you to jump off a cliff, would you? She may have said this, I don't recall. What I do remember was complaining about what other kids were allowed to do. Her reply was that I wasn't Jill or Sarah, I was Shelley J__ B___. I recall one time when she was trying to get me to conform to something she said, Why not be more like Joanne or Mary? My smart reply was because I was Shelley J__ B____... She laughed.

It'll all end in tears  She'll have said something to this effect, but not these words. 

It's like Blackpool bloody illuminations in here.  I'm sure I never heard of Blackpool until moving to Newcastle - and having been once I can report that there are a lot of neon lights there. I'm guessing this is a complaint about too many lights on in the house. I don't recall us being very conscientious about the electric bill in this way, though I expect we should have been. 

Mom wasn't at all like the person described in these sayings. She was tough as nails in a determined sort of way, but decidedly a Southern lady in all her endeavors. Her hardest battle was to try to make me into one. 

Tuesday 4 August 2020

Grandmother's Birthday

It doesn't seem a year since I last 'celebrated' Grandmother's birthday. I guess that is a sure sign of my own increasing age.

Last week a cousin - a third cousin to be more precise - posted a video on Facebook. It was by a group called Anthem Lights and the song was 'In the Garden'. Though hymns aren't at all my thing, this took me back quite a few decades to my childhood and I was surprised at remembering all the words - to the first verse anyhow. 

I commented that it reminded me of evenings in Grandmother's kitchen. She would be puttering around making cherry pies or boiling minced beef (for her dogs) and all the while she'd be humming hymns. I particularly remember 'Rock of Ages'. 




To be honest, I always thought the words were a bit strange: wanting to hide inside a rock? And lots of stuff about blood. Never mind, she sounded content and so all was right with the world, for the moment. Until something happened like a dog peeing on the floor and then she'd screech and swear at it. That was a good time to quietly back out of the room. 

I grew up knowing that a very scary lady loved me an awful lot, but it didn't pay to push ones luck. Happy birthday, Grandmother!

Monday 3 August 2020

Caveat Emptor

Bill and I went into lockdown the evening of 16 March. I'd intended to nip into the Coop convenience store for milk and cookies for the WI Craft group that evening but when several members sent emails saying they wouldn't be coming because of the PM's announcement telling people to stay home, we cancelled Craft Group. I went to the Coop anyhow to pick up some fresh fruit and veg, not knowing what arrangements for shopping would be in future. Bill came home from his running club that evening and we were AT HOME.

Just that day, we'd been into every shop in North Shields looking to buy hand sanitiser and paracetamol. We found some water soluable paracetamol (horrible tasting stuff, but needs must) but no hand sanitiser in any shop whatsoever.

So I got onto eBay and ordered some. As I recall there wasn't a lot of reasonably priced stuff on offer, but I selected a seller that offered a reasonably large bottle for £11 and I ordered two, which somehow gave me a discount. We never had need of it since we didn't go out except to walk and we never needed to touch anything while walking (well, I never did, Bill forgets occasionally). So I forgot about having ordered the stuff until a few months later when I sat down with a bunch of papers to figure out where my money had gone. When I found the Paypal charge I realised I'd never received the hand sanitiser. It was by then too late to claim back from eBay.

The £17.60 wasn't going to break me, but I was annoyed with myself for not looking more closely at this seller. It was also my own fault for a) not following up promptly and b) being too lazy to read through all the instructions on eBay...all their FAQs are for irrelevancies and I couldn't find an actual person to write to for the protocol. So I figured the seller would likely continue to get away with this, though I see she's not sold anything for the past month, so perhaps there is a limit to fraudulent behaviour that even eBay will tolerate.





Then it occurred to me to contact Paypal. Fortunately their complaints procedure is much simpler. I just got in touch with the Chat line and they transferred me to the complaints department. It took a couple of weeks, but even though the seller never replied to their inquiries, they refunded my £17.60! I'm pleased I didn't give up even if I was very late in following up. Sadly I suspect this is like with bankruptcies, where the costs to the businesses are passed on to other customers. 

I will definitely be more cautious in my eBay purchases from now on.

Friday 3 July 2020

Bill's Crackers (but you knew that)

This story begins with a bucket of yogurt. I've had reasonable success freezing and thawing yogurt for later use, but I've learned that success may vary with different brands. It always separates to some extent, but stirring generally does the trick. Not with this latest purchase however. Lovely and creamy when new, but not only did it separate but the solid part was grainy and Bill couldn't cope with this. 



So I strained it overnight, putting a double fold of linen towel into a strainer suspended over a bowl. The result was a jar of whey which I will put into some muffins and a tub of 'yogurt cheese'. I knew I could put garlic, herbs and salt into this to make a kind of dip but before I did that I asked Bill for ideas. His response was to make some cream crackers. I think they should be illegal. 



On the other hand, this is in keeping with the recommendation Michael Pollen makes in his book, In Defense of Food. If you want unhealthy snack food, don't buy it at the store, make it yourself. This will limit the number of times you'll eat it. Not that crackers are terribly unhealthy, they're just terrible. Because we eat them, not just with yogurt cheese but with peanut butter or regular butter. The carbohydrate and the crunch combined with something fattening is almost irresistible. I think this is the recipe he used. 




Whey.


So I'd best fight back by making those muffins, right?


Wednesday 1 July 2020

Putting a Mask on It

I've been absent the last couple of posting days. On Tuesday last week the neighbours (the ones from which we are 'semi-detached') began a major overhaul of their kitchen / dining / utility room by taking out a wall and putting a door to the outside where a window once was. This is the second wall they've removed and Bill teased me that their house was going to fall down and take ours with it. I didn't find that in the least funny. I'm hoping they aren't creating an echo chamber next door as we already hear far too much of their lives as it is. However, it's out of my hands and I try not to worry about things I can't do anything about.

I had the bad timing on Tuesday to have a migraine about the time the hammering and drilling began. I took some ibuprofen and went to find refuge in the back seat of our car. After a couple of hours I felt well enough to finish the post I'd started but that was all I could manage on my Writing Day. And strangely enough I forgot all about this blog over the weekend. So while the plasterers and electricians carry on their work today, I'm very pleased to say I have no headache.

On the inside. You can see how the wire bends over Bill's nose.


A couple of weeks ago, Bill had asked me to make him a mask. I've been going through all the fabric stash in my craft room and pulling out what I thought were suitable cottons, zigzagging the edges and putting them through the wash. I expect I could make a couple hundred masks if I needed to, but I think half a dozen for each of us should be ample, particularly since we largely stay at home. I went into the post office last Monday to send off my US tax returns (because I'm married to a foreigner and filing separately I'm not allowed to file my taxes online). It was fairly scary but I think I may have got away with it. Bill just went into a small local DIY store this morning, having scoped it out at the weekend. He chose it because a) they are a local one-off shop and b) they hardly have any customers in ordinary times. We have groceries delivered or Bill goes to shops or cafes that serve at their front doors. We have no plans to visit any pubs, restaurants or supermarkets for the foreseeable future. We both feel very fortunate that we are able to stay safe at home most of the time.

So I wasn't in any hurry to make him a mask, but I finally did. Out of Winnie-the-Pooh fabric.

From the outside. 


I chose a pattern by a German lady named Iris Luckhaus, who was a professional pattern drafter at one time. She reviewed a lot of different patterns for masks, decided they all had shortcomings and then drafted her own. She explains it all here. I will make this again, I think, only I may try to figure out how to put a filter between the two cotton layers. It's a pretty straightforward pattern using two 8" squares and two small rectangles and two lengths of elastic. It also has a channel in the top for a piece of wire which can be removed for washing. I used florist wire. The hardest part was figuring out the pleats - I've never made anything with pleats in my life - but I eventually got there. She has quite a few diagrams and I finally found the one that clicked with my somewhat deficient brain. 

I put the elastic through the tubes made by the small rectangles and then had Bill put it on. I tied the elastic behind each ear and adjusted the fit per his instructions, tying a double knot on each side. Then I tightened the knots, trimmed the excess elastic and pulled the knots into the tubes on each side to keep them out of the way.



Sadly, you can't tell it's Winnie the Pooh fabric, but I have a number of other children's cotton prints that I put aside for Bill. Those of you who know him will likely agree this is entirely suitable. 






Wednesday 24 June 2020

Not Quite Keeping Up

I chose the book for our WI Book Group for June: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo. I chose it based on the fact that it won the Booker Prize for 2019 (or perhaps half - it was the first ever shared prize, along with The Testament, by Margaret Atwood.) Also that it appeared on Barack Obama's list of favourite books he read in 2019. I can't say I'm an Atwood fan, though I recognise she is a powerful writer. It's just that I find her books to be rather depressing and I prefer a bit of escapism in my reading. I'm not sure I'd call what I got as escaping, but Evaristo's book was far from boring.

Every one in the book group said they really enjoyed the book and our discussion was lively. They congratulated me on a timely choice, as though I knew back in May that George Floyd would be murdered and that his death would cause protests world wide. 

Without getting into the story line(s) of the book, it did strike me as being as much about sex as it was about race. I remember telling Bill that the first character, Amma, was not only black, but gay, worked in theatre and lived in London. I commented that I couldn't find a character more opposite to me: white, straight, stuck in my left-brain and definitely a suburban girl. Fortunately the book has many stories and Amma's is only the beginning. I never came to like Amma but I definitely respected her.

While making my way through this book my attention was drawn to the controversy around J. K. Rowling's essay that revealed a sad past of abuse. The essay highlighted her concern that women's private spaces were potentially about to be invaded by men claiming they were women (in spite of no hormone therapy or surgery) and therefore entitled to be in the women's toilets or changing rooms. She saw this as a potential threat to the safety and well-being of women. She also questioned the motivation of young women wishing to become men; was it because the world treats women as less than men?

I'd read about the actors who distanced themselves from Rowlings viewpoint but didn't read her essay until a New York Times opinion piece titled "Harry Potter and the Scales of Justice" claimed that Rowling's essay was full of hate. That seemed so unlikely that I had to go read it for myself; it certainly is not. However, I found that I needed to look up a number of words to understand her meaning, which made me aware that I've just not been keeping up with the goings on in the world. Just in case you haven't either, I shall share some of the things I learned.

I think I've always used the terms 'sex' and 'gender' as interchangeable, but nowadays they are different things (or perhaps they always were). Simply put, 'gender' is what is in the brain and 'sex' is what is in the pants. Also, 'cis' is from the Latin for 'on this side of ' which is the opposite of trans, meaning 'across from'. So a person who is 'cis-gendered' is lucky enough to have been born with the same genitalia as how they feel in their mind.  

Non-binary can be someone who doesn't necessarily identify as either male or female, but apparently non-binary is a term that means different things to different people and it is important to ask an individual who identifies as non-binary what it means to them. They may well wish to be referred to as they-them rather than he/she-him/her. The character Megan / Morgan in Evaristo's book was actually one of the more popular with our book group, simply wanting to be able to be themselves without having to live up to the expectations of either a feminine or masculine stereotype. 

Another thing that was cleared up for me is that the sex that comes after the word 'trans' is what that person has become, not what they used to be or changed from.  Also, that sexual orientation is a completely different issue to sex or gender, referring to whom one is attracted. For example, a person born male who became female can be attracted to either men or women; or a woman who became a man can be attracted to either men or women. 

All these terms and concepts were news to me and though I'm glad I looked them up, I don't feel hugely wiser. How many people aren't happy about being men or women? Have there always been this many and I just didn't know? One thought that I cling to is the idea that I just need to treat people as human beings, I don't necessarily have to understand them; after all there are plenty of cis-gender people I've never really understood. 

I wonder how all this will be looked back on in fifty years. Will the idea of male/female identity be outdated? What will have replaced it? Will people look back on this as a time of great change and confusion out of which good things came? Will women of any ilk have equal pay and equal representation in places of power? Will Black Lives Matter have achieved their aims? And, most importantly in my opinion, will we have saved our planet from ruin? I can't say I'm optimistic about much of this, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Monday 22 June 2020

Hearts

Our WI Craft group Zoomed in May to chat and share what each of us had made during the past month or so. Someone suggested we have a theme for what we made in June and they came up with 'hearts'.  After we all signed off, I promptly forgot all about it.


The committee for our WI decided we should join Zoom for the £12-13 a month it costs so that we didn't need to bother with the 40 minute limit. We Zoom for our regular meetings, for committee meetings, book groups and book social meetings, craft group and other chat meetings and, soon, coffee mornings. While it is true we aren't bringing in money at face to face meetings we do have a substantial financial cushion and the Zoom fee is something like 20% of the rent we paid to rent the Parish Hall.


Some email or other about booking the Zoom call reminded me about hearts and so that very Monday I sat down with my three cookie cutters (bought for crafting, not baking) and came up with lavender bags. I have about three years' worth of dried lavender from my seven or eight bushes which are growing nicely just now, but not yet in flower. Except for the French lavender which has done it's best ever this year. 


I started with some black net fabric that was in my Aunt Rita's stash. Sadly the plastic red hearts stamped on the netting stuck together after being folded for years. I liked the silver back better than the now patchy red and silver fronts. My sewing machine didn't like any of it, so I sat down to do some hand sewing. I don't care for the look of the lavender through the net, but Bill liked it.

Years ago I played around making heart and star shapes out of sheer fabric bits in my stash. My sewing machine liked this sheer fabric better, apparently (a sharp, new needle, perhaps) and I sort of got away with making these shapes. I called them 'fairy bandaids'... no comment. Anyhow, I found a couple of these and stitched them together for another lavender bag.



Finally, I tried something larger with some more solid fabrics. The back solid is a kind of textured silk I imagine Rita making a cocktail dress from. The front vintage print is in polyester. I think it was given me by one of the sewing ladies from the Linskill group and I imagine it dates back to at least the 70s if not 60s. I had to look up how to do a blanket stitch again and putting this last one together took the most time, but I think I like it the best. They all smell delicious!

The two other ladies produced hearts in a similar fashion as lavender bags, though I think theirs may have been stuffed with something else. One new person had made a great hanging of three hearts in different blue fabrics from old clothes plus some twine and a couple of sticks. Someone else had worked on a cross-stitch for their first grandchild, a girl, which had lots of hearts in it. One lady made some paper cards which employed hearts; I envy her great eye for design. And one of our very clever knitters knitted a three-dimensional snail character whose shell was in the shape of a heart. 

Our theme for next month is flowers. I'll be working on the knitted flower squares of a blanket I'm making, which is a bit boring, but I'm looking forward to seeing what the others come up with!



Friday 19 June 2020

Breakfast

On Fridays at our house Bill makes bread in the bread maker. I stocked a small tin of yeast for Brexit last year and had a few part-bags of various bread flours when we went into lock down. Since then we've shopped at Buy-the-Kilo, just down the street at the Metro station, to top up the strong white flour. 'Strong flour' has plenty of gluten, needed for making most breads, and is made from durum wheat. This is what all regular flour in the US is made from, apparently, something I only learned in the past few years. We enjoy toast and home made jam on Saturday and Sunday mornings - in bed, to be completely decadent.

The last of the birthday flowers: lavender alliums and some sort of white filler flowers.

During the week, however, we have breakfast at the dining table. Following advice from a former blog Like Merchant Ships (she stopped writing her blog in 2010, but carried on at Tumblr until October last year) to avoid using commercial labels at the table, we have decanted porridge oats (oatmeal) and Grape Nuts into glass jars. Also my instant coffee. In winter we have hot porridge.

The circular metal tray on a hardboard place mat (a British thing, most place mats in the US are fabric) acts almost as well as a Lazy Susan (I wonder, who was Susan?). In addition to cereals, coffee and sweeteners are containers with Bill's 'medications' recommended un-officially by his consultant after he cracked a knee cap while running a couple of years ago: glucosamine and cod liver oil (he pays me no attention when I mention dioxin concentration in fish oils). His knee no longer bothers him - other than I think he drags that foot a bit and needs physio / exercises - and he's thinking of giving these meds a miss when they run out to see what happens. He buys them by the million on eBay. (I see he has put them in plastic food containers that still have a label - must try harder!)

As well as the circular tray, we have our good china and silver, a teapot (full of tea) for Bill and another pot of hot water for me. Bill likes to chop his fresh fruit each morning. I make a box of a wider variety of fruits - including some tinned peaches or fruit cocktail - on Sunday afternoon in preparation for the week. There is also a small creamer jug filled with the last of a wine bottle of orange syrup, or sometimes rose hip syrup, and a large jug of milk.

We eat, then drink hot beverages until we are sloshing, or out of conversation, and then get on with our day.

Wednesday 17 June 2020

Changing Flowers

You may or may not remember that I got some gorgeous flowers for my birthday. I was a bit surprised that it was the carnations that died off first, though the roses looked a bit elderly from the start. At first all I did was to remove the dead carnations, rinse and trim the stems, scrub out the vase and replace it all with fresh water. (I'd forgotten that flowers require a fair amount of attention).




The other thing I did was to remove the lilies and put them in a vase by themselves. The strong smell didn't work very well at the dining table, which I chose as a location because it doesn't get direct sun and we spend a fair amount of time there, morning and evening. I put the vase of lilies in the North Wing (the small room off the hallway leading to the downstairs loo) thinking the smell would be the least obtrusive there. 





Bill opened a wing of the gate leg table in the hall and moved them there, saying the smell would dissipate sufficiently for him. He has an experience of surveying a house in which an elderly woman had died and not been discovered for an unfortunate length of time. Someone had attempted to hide the resulting smell with lilies and this association has remained with him. I don't like strong smells to interfere with the taste of my food, but I could live with a passing waft now and then.



When the next change of water was needed I didn't feel the flowers filled the blue jug well enough anymore, so I broke up the flowers into smaller containers: on the kitchen window sill, on the upstairs landing, in the living room (a bad idea as the damp weather has led me to turn on the fire and flowers don't like heat at all), as well as the dining table. 



They've all pretty much faded now and will need further culling to see if any further blooms are worth re-homing. I'm not sure whether two weeks is a great run for Bill's money, but they were glorious while they lasted.



Our next Women's Institute meeting for July will be a Zoom meeting with a florist and I'm looking forward to picking up some tips from her!

Monday 15 June 2020

The Lodgers

On one of the really warm nights we had last month I opened both bedroom windows as we were getting ready for bed. The next morning Bill opened the curtains and remarked that we had a wasps' nest in the eve above the north side of the bay window. 

We debated who to call about this and Bill said he would consult a friend in the Long Distance Walkers' Association that he calls The Rat Man, as John works in extermination - and apparently has tons of fascinating stories to tell on long walks. 

I watched them for a while and decided these weren't wasps, they were bees. This complicated the matter. I'm ready to kill wasps but not bees. I'd rather not kill either, frankly, but my home has priority over wasps. I've already had uninvited guests in my roof and it was a real nuisance

The Rat Man's reply was that by the time a bee hive is noticed, the activity is at its peak and they'll move along by themselves eventually. So I'm happy to leave it a few months. Come autumn I may need him to come over with his tall ladder and remove them to another location so I can repair the tiny droop in a corner piece of wood that allowed them entry. I'm learning that triangular pieces of wood are vulnerable locations.




In the meantime we co-exist reasonably well. They only seem to buzz around in daylight when it gets warm enough, so opening the windows at night isn't a problem especially since we keep the curtains shut for privacy. Our favourite sitting place is below them, next to the front porch where it is sunny and sheltered, but they don't come visit much. I had one light on my leg once but a casual wave of my hand sent him away. I'm terrified of wasps but bees don't bother me. They kindly share their flowers with me. 

Bill refers to these creatures as The Lodgers; he seems to have a nickname for most things. This reminds me of the film Gosford Park. There is a scene with Jeremy Northam and Maggie Smith that always makes me smile. If you've not seen Gosford Park, I highly recommend it. 


Friday 12 June 2020

Kitchen Issues

For years, every Thanksgiving, I have bought new containers of baking powder and of baking soda (AKA bicarbonate of soda) to be sure my holiday baking turns out well. (Also ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, but that is a different post). Not that I don't still have other containers of baking powder /soda in the cupboard, I just don't trust them - in date or out of date, they aren't always reliable.

One of the last times I did this I got rather fed up. I know that baking soda can also be used as a cleaner on bathroom fixtures, being a bit abrasive. It is also useful for absorbing unwanted smells in places like the refrigerator. But those bases are already covered with other out of date containers. Also, I was wondering if there was anything I could do with out of date baking powder. Turns out it's also slightly abrasive, so could in theory be used as a cleaner.

Another question I had was how to tell if they might still be good for their original baking purposes. So I looked it up. 

For baking soda, put about a quarter teaspoon of the baking soda into about 3 tablespoons of vinegar. It should fizz quite a bit as soon as it hits the vinegar (so choose a bowl large enough to contain this reaction). If it doesn't fizz or does so slowly, it probably won't act as the rising agent you want.

For baking powder, do much the same, only with a half a cup of hot water instead of vinegar. Apparently baking powder reacts twice in your baking: once when it meets the liquid and again when the mixture is heated. That was new news to me, for sure.

Another thing I learned was that unopened baking powder is more likely to still be active as it is exposure to damp that causes it to lose its lift.  Unopened baking soda lasts almost indefinitely and one source suggested that opened baking soda could last as long as about three years; other sources say indefinitely...so knowing how to test it is important.

I already knew that a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar would make the equivalent of baking powder. The equivalent of a teaspoon of baking powder is made by mixing one-half teaspoon of cream of tartar with one-quarter teaspoon of baking soda. This adds up to three-quarters of a teaspoon of powder, not a whole teaspoon, which suggests that the homemade mixture may well be stronger than store bought. 

Finally, given that baking soda has quite a long shelf life so long as it is kept dry and cool, I wondered about the shelf life of cream of tartar. Given dry and cool conditions it apparently also lasts indefinitely. 

All this has made me decide to a) test my opened baking powder and if it bubbles, use it up sooner rather than later; b) buy more cream of tartar; c) make sure I only ever have one opened container of any of these items at a time regardless of any use-by dates; d) have a go at making my own baking powder. If I make small amounts when needed and keep the baking soda and cream of tartar dry, I might save a bit of money and prevent some needless waste.

Do you ever research questions like this?




Wednesday 10 June 2020

L S D

I was reading yet another Lord Peter Wimsey novel one night last week when I came across a reference to old British money: £ s d. The first symbol is of course for the Great British Pound and I vaguely remembered that the 's' stood for 'shillings' but I was thinking the next word should be 'pence' but there was a 'd', not a 'p'. I asked Bill to look it up on his phone and he came up with the fact that the £ symbol originated with the Latin word "Librae" and that this is where we get the abbreviation for a pound (weight) as lb. After that he came up with 's' is for solidi and 'd' is for denarii but that got me no closer to shillings or pence. 

So I scribbled a note to myself and looked it up. Of course it's not very simple, not simple at all. 


According to Wikipedia, while the words to referring to the coinage of course are Latin and therefore to do with the Roman Empire, the definition of the amounts and the relative value between the coins was introduced by Charlemagne. The term Libra comes from the Latin for 'balance' as in balancing scales. This makes sense as Charlemagne decided that his pound weight would be roughly 490 grams, which is what a Libra weighed. The current pound weight in Britain is about 454 grams and no longer has anything to do with the weight of a GBP coin. Charlemagne's system was prevalent throughout Europe until the decimalisations that occurred in the 1700 and 1800s. Except of course for Britain where they didn't change over until 1971. The (new-ish) United States was one of the first countries to change to a decimal system, in 1792.


Under the old system there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings (or 240 pence) in a pound. Somewhere along the line I thought someone told me there were 17 pence in a shilling and when Bill would brag about how good some member of his family was at adding columns of money in his head, I was truly in awe. Multiples of 12 are a little less daunting, but I'm sure most folks are forever grateful for decimalisation (or would be if they thought about it). 


Interestingly, or so I thought, in the middle ages, only denari were actual coins, made of silver. Librae and soldi were just used as accounting terms. Over time (and inflation) in Britain, as elsewhere, other coins began to be minted (guineas, crowns, farthings, half-pennies, etc) but the original terms were still used in accounting.


All well and good, but I still didn't understand how one got from 'soldi' to 'shillings' or 'denarii' to 'pence'. So, back to Europe, in France they called these coins livre, sous and denier. In Italy they were lira, soldo and denaro. In Germany, however, the names were pfund, schilling and pfennig, which gets us closer to the English names.

I was surprised to learn that pence is another plural for penny, in addition to pennies. So all those times I've got confused and called a pence a penny, I was right after all. Or I would have been fifty years ago, as with decimalisation Britain began to say 'one pence'. Oh well.


Since Wikipedia took me no further about these names, I turned to my old friend the etymology dictionary.  To start with, solidi / solidus means 'solid' - as in a solid metal coin. So obvious, right?


Also, the old English scilling comes from "Proto-Germanic". The German term might either come from a word for 'to resound or ring' or possibly from a word 'to cut' as perhaps one might carve a shield, which has similarity to the face of a coin. I'm rather partial to the things being named for the jingle they make in a pocket. The ending 'ing' is a Germanic term for a 'fractional part' (also in farthing), which makes sense given that a shilling was a fraction of a pound.


The word denari is Latin for "containing ten", which sounds great until you remember that there were 12 denari in a solidus. Perhaps there was an earlier decimal system that time has buried? No one else seems bothered about the difference between ten and twelve, so I've no idea.


The etymology of pence is useless so I looked up penny. Tracing the beginnings of that word takes us through middle and old English and Northumbrian p-words to our old friend Proto-Germanic - also Dutch, Danish, Swedish, not to mention Old Saxon and Old Frisian and of course Old Germanic p-words - and finishes by saying, "a word of unknown origin". But it was a fun ride.


On this particular evening when I was asking Bill to explain "£ s d" he turned around and asked where the symbol for USDs - $ - originated. Since I read books, not internet devices before sleeping, I just left him with 'I've no idea.' 


But I looked that up too.

Monday 8 June 2020

From Some Walks

I've skipped over a lot of photos taken while out on walks. I'm not walking miuch these days. I've been trying to get out and run / jog / hobble short distances each morning when I wake, sometime between 5 and 6 AM. It took a lot of time to get used to doing this first thing but experience tells me that a) I'll put it off indefinitely unless it is first thing and b) there are a lot fewer people out to dodge at that time in the morning. I'm hoping to increase my time/distance gradually in the coming months, but we'll see how it goes. One thing is for sure, it doesn't facilitate taking more photos. So I'll share a few here:





Does anyone know what this plant is? It grows well in the gardens right on the seafront at Cullercoats. I really like the grey-green foliage.





St Paul's Church in Whitley Bay, is beautifully lit, only one of the lights was malfunctioning and the flashing light / giant tree gave it more a Frankenstein air than one of lovely serenity.







 Monkseaton moon at dusk.




This lighthouse on the roundabout at Whitley Bay is a piece of art, perhaps 6-7 feet tall.




Tulips against a stone wall at Marden. I'm sure Bill thought I was barmy, dashing off to snap this. I just love stone walls ... and pink tulips. 

And besides, beauty comforts me.



Friday 5 June 2020

Another Kitchen Day

I have dutifully spent time in the kitchen each Friday the past few months, with varying success, which is to say not a huge amount lately. In my last post about jam, I showed all sorts of apple jellies (it's taken me decades to work out the difference between these two terms, that's how daft I am). These were made with scraps - the peels and cores - mostly from the many cooking apples that my friend Pat gave me, but also with some apples from Vivien, another friend. I used the recipe from this blog and had great success, along with the 'zingers' mentioned on the Northwest Edible blog I mentioned in that other post. The rest of the apples were stewed, because Bill loves stewed apples with his porridge in winter.

Apple Syrup
I had not so much success this time. I'd saved apple cores from a lot of Royal Gala apples and when I couldn't cram anything else in the bottom scrap drawer, I made some more jelly but it never even pretended to set, not after two tries to make it work. For the 3rd time I pulled out the last bag of scraps which had some peels in and it almost - but not quite - set. So I've concluded that most of the pectin is in the peel. The failed jelly has been poured into a wine bottle and frozen with the label 'Apple Syrup'. As it also has ginger and brandy in, I'm sure it will make breakfast cereal or pancakes sing!

Cold Tea
I'm aware that this will be anathema to most Brits, but for me it is a celebration of lovely warm, sunny weather we've enjoyed these last few weeks (due to disappear soon, I believe). I make a pot of tea and when well steeped - more like stewed, probably - I pour cold tap water into an empty coffee jar and add the hot tea (don't want the glass to break!). It then goes into the fridge door to cool. I don't bother with ice these days - it's not that warm! - and in any case most of my ice cube trays are full of herbs in olive oil or the like. I used to enjoy lemon juice in my tea, but this isn't good for my tummy these days so I drink it black (pale brown, actually). I find it very refreshing. What can I say? I'm a Southern gal.

Carrot and Coriander Soup 
I pulled out the last (I hope) box of chopped carrots from the chest freezer. I may have mentioned elsewhere that we found ourselves buying horse carrots on a couple of occasions, in quantities that were just silly (but incredibly cheap). In each instance they began to go off before we finished them and so I had a session of chopping, blanching and freezing around the end of last year. Well, this box didn't work out as well for some reason and the carrots were all fairly mushy. Bill noticed our bowl of coriander was possibly going to bolt and he hoped I'd come up with a use for it before that happened. (That sort of thing always seems to be my job, but since he does so much other stuff around the house, I can't really complain). I wasn't sure I'd like the soup, but it was worth a try and as I only had one third of the carrots required for the recipe, we weren't overwhelmed with the amount of soup that resulted from mathing (that's a word, right?) the ingredient list down to one third. Sadly, I forgot to take a photo of the soup, but I can show you my coriander 'bed'.




Turns out I like carrot and coriander soup just find. There is a bit of the soup left and it will go into a curry recipe in A Girl Called Jack, by Jack Monroe, one of my culinary
heroes. 


Salmon Pasta
We've not had yoghurt in the house for a while but I found some available for delivery and this enabled me to use some of my Brexit stash - bottles of salmon paste - to make Jack's recipe for salmon pasta, even though we were out of onions, which are apparently in short supply these days. I used onion powder instead, and chili flakes instead of a chopped chili and it turned out fine. I've forgotten what a bottle of salmon paste costs but it's buttons and, combined with the yoghurt, it makes a wonderful pasta sauce. Which is a good thing, because putting salmon paste on crackers, probably what it's intended for, just doesn't appeal to me.

Crabby Lime (chutney??)




If my apple jelly didn't work great, Bill really enjoyed the last small jar of Crabby Lime something (I'm not a fan of chutney - other than mango - and wouldn't ever attempt to make any on purpose). I made this on a whim with the leftovers of the last of a batch of crab apple jelly (too little to make a full jar) and some compulsively hoarded lime 'endocarp' according to this website. I probably would have called it the 'meat' as opposed to the rind, or the juice, but endocarp sounds terribly erudite, doesn't it? I had got a bunch of limes inexpensively but hadn't known what to do with them other than put slices into tonic as a form of 'soft drink'. When they threatened to dry up, I wrung the little devils dry but thought all that ...endocarp... shouldn't go to waste so I scraped it out and froze it; the peels were definitely unattractive. Not knowing what else to do with it I threw it into the crab apple jelly - and crabby lime (something) was born. I thawed it and presented it to Bill to tell me if it was trash and he LOVED it.  Kitchen experiments are just my absolute favourite things. Looking up the definition of chutney, one finds that it can be a condiment made of sweets and acids, so chutney it is.

Have you played in the kitchen lately?