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.

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!

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.

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!

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. 

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?

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.