Pining for the West
Delia versus Nigella.
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I watched Delia on T.V. during the week and it was just like coming home after a horrendous day out. There’s something so comforting about her, especially the Christmas programmes. Yes, I know that this was going to be a Christmas Free Zone – but we’re in December now so I suppose I should try to get into the spirit of it all.
Delia did go a bit weird at one point and started showing us how to make toast and such like and the tinned mince and frozen potatoes stuff was just horrible, but she seems to be back into normal mode now.
The great thing about Delia is that the recipes are so well researched that they always work, nothing is left to chance. I know that she has a team of people to help with this, it isn’t just Delia. The thing is that the recipes are obviously meant to be tried out at home, that’s the whole reason for doing the programmes. She tells you exactly how to do things and the correct times and temperatures, which is what you need.
It’s nice to see her walking with her husband in his Norwich City scarf too, and I suppose if you are into cats then you’ll be keen on that aspect of it. I wouldn’t mind cats if they stuck to their own gardens.
Nigella on the other hand is a different entity altogether. I watched her programme yesterday morning and yes the whole thing did look luscious but – she doesn’t go into the details of anything. It’s as if the whole thing was just a puff for Nigella and we just aren’t expected to actually want to cook any of the food.
The soup would be easy to replicate I’m sure. Well you can’t go far wrong with soup, but the pudding with the wonderful name of Girdlebuster Pie was the sort of thing that you need to know all the proper weights of the ingredients to get the correct consistency.
Nigella said, “Put some digestive biscuits, chocolate and unsalted butter into your food processor,” – and that was it.
Apparently the Girdlebuster Pie was a staple of American diners in the 1950s and it looked so delicious that I was determined to get the recipe. It wasn’t on the BBC website but my husband managed to track it down for me on The Daily Mail website.
So it seems to me that Nigella is just all about how everything looks. It’s Nigella as the soft porn and the food is her supporting act of pure hard core.
I suppose it’s aimed at men but really the lingering looks and flirtatiousness are taken to such lengths that it has just become laughable. She moves her head very strangely and it was making me feel quite sea-sick. She reminded me of a dusky Lady Penelope from The Thunderbirds. The head movements are just the same but Lady Penelope has an excuse for it – being a string puppet.
So all in all, I think that Delia wins hands down with her home cooking ways. I’m going to have to try that Girdlebuster Pie though. I think I’ll make it for my husband’s birthday cake. He is one of those poor souls who was born on the 24th December. I’ll post a photo of it then.
Flashback Challenge
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I’ve been reading about all these book challenges that are going on and thought that it was about time that I signed up for one myself. The Flashback Challenge seems like a great excuse to re-read ‘old friends’ and I’m really enthusiastic about it, so I’m planning to read 12 books again, one for each month of the year – and here they are.
Flashback Challenge books
As I’ve never participated in a book challenge before, I’m just presuming that the idea is you write a review in your blog. Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing with these books, although not particularly in this order.
1. The Enchanted April – by Elizabeth von Arnim.
2. Lark Rise – Flora Thompson.
3. And Quiet Flows the Don- Mikhail Sholokhov.
4. The Fortunes of War – Olivia Manning.
5. Strong Poison – Dorothy L. Sayers.
6. The Railway Children – E. Nesbit.
7. The Golden Age – Gore Vidal
8. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee.
9. Scenes of Clerical Life – George Eliot
10. Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie.
11. Kidnapped – R.L. Stevenson.
12. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier.
I’m looking forward to it.
Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser
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This book was first published in 1969 and at 667 pages the sheer thickness of it could be a wee bit off putting to anyone with lots of books in the ‘to be read pile’. However, if you are at all interested in Mary Stuart then this is a must read for you.
You can easily tell that Antonia Fraser has a real passion for Mary and she obviously did a fantastic amount of research on her subject, which I suspect was a real treat for her.
Mary Stuart has always been a familiar tragic figure to me. My favourite doll as a teeny wee girl was that well known one of her dressed in a black velvet gown with a lace cloak. When I was told of her sorry tale and ghastly end – well, you couldn’t not love the idea of her.
So it was inevitable that I was going to read this book sometime.The book won the James Tait Memorial Prize and although it was written so long ago, it has never been bettered.
Although the book is packed with historical detail, it never becomes dry or boring as Antonia Fraser has a wonderful free-flowing way with words. Despite the fact that she is so keen on her subject, it hasn’t blinded her to the fact that Mary was very far from being perfect. It’s a real pity that she didn’t take a leaf out of her cousin Elizabeth’s book and steer clear of marriage altogether.
It seems that wherever you live in Scotland, you will be close to a castle or palace with links to Mary Stuart.
She was born in Linlithgow Palace in 1542. The palace is just a shell now as it caught fire in 1746, but it must have been wonderful in its day.
Her first marriage to the dauphin ended when he died of complications from an ear infection a month before his 17th birthday. So at the age of 18, Mary sailed for Scotland after 13 years in France.
Considering that she was a Roman Catholic queen in a Presbyterian country, things went rather well for her. She was greeted by enthusiastic crowds and she didn’t disappoint them.
Her choice of husbands left a lot to be desired and brought nothing but trouble for her.
She gave birth to her only child James VI in Edinburgh Castle.
She spent a large part of her life being held captive in various
castles, and managed to escape from a few of them. Lochleven Castle being the most famous escape.
She loved to spend time at Falkland Palace in Fife, where she could ride and fly her falcons. This palace is well worth a visit, there is plenty to see, it has lovely gardens and the village of Falkland itself is worth a walk round. For those who are a bit more energetic, take time to walk up the East and West Lomonds, to get a great view.
Jane Austen – her death
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I had thought that it was fairly definite that Jane Austen had died of Addisons disease but this article in today’s Guardian has come up with another theory.
Whatever the cause, I just think that we were really lucky that she didn’t get married as she would probably have died much younger than she did. The mortality rate for women in childbirth or its aftermath must have been enormous.
It’s quite a long time since I read Jane Austen’s letters, but I seem to remember that at one point three of her friends died in childbirth in the same week. Enough to put anyone off.
Scottish Words.
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Bidey-in.
In Scotland if you are – as my mother would have put it – living in sin with someone, then they are described as being your bidey-in. I really like this wee phrase as it describes the relationship perfectly and it is the same whether it is a man or a woman. They are the person that you stay in with, rather than just someone that you go out with.
I don’t like this modern thing nowadays where everyone is described as someone’s ‘partner’. I’ve even heard the ‘p’ word being used to describe wives and husbands, which I really can’t understand. I wouldn’t be at all chuffed to be described in that way, seeing that we went to the bother of actually getting married and paying £7.50 for the marriage licence.
We had a family meal out last night and our youngest son and his lovely ‘bidey-in’ managed to come through from Dundee for it, but I’ve got a horrible feeling that they describe themselves as partners on Facebook.
It would be great if everyone would adopt that lovely non-sexist term of bidey-in. It just sounds so homely to me.
I’m scunnered by partners. They should all have their bahoukies skelped, and become bidey-ins.
The Country House by John Galsworthy
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The only other Galsworthy books which I have read have been The Forsyte Saga series so I was interested to see what one of his more obscure books was like. Previously I have found his books to be very enjoyable and well written and I wasn’t disappointed with this one.
I galloped through it at a good pace because I found it to be so straightforward and clear, which isn’t always the way with Victorian novels. Strictly speaking, I suppose that The Country House is Edwardian as it was first published in 1907. However the action takes place in 1891. The themes are similar to those of The Forsyte Saga – family, marriage and infidelity.
Chapter 1 starts with guests arriving for a house party at Worsted Skeynes, it is the first shooting party of the season. At first I felt that there were rather a lot of characters being thrown at me and everyone seemed to be described minutely. I was a bit worried that it would all be a bit too much for bedtime reading but they all just seemed to fall into place without any complications.
The estate is owned by Horace Pendyce and has been in his family for generations but although it is farmed on model lines, it still runs on a slight loss. He is married to Margery and they have grown up children, 2 boys and 2 girls.
The eldest son, George owns a racehorse and has developed a secret gambling habit whilst living in town. A relationship develops between him and Helen Bellew, who is the estranged wife of a neighbour. She has left her husband, supposedly because he has a drink problem, however as she is a bit of a man-eater, there is always the possibility that she drove him to drink. They are regarded as both being at fault in the break up of the marriage, but when Jasper Bellew serves divorce papers to George, his parents are horrified to discover that he isn’t the sort of character that they had thought him to be.
The thought of such a scandal in his family is almost more than the squire can bear and there is a meeting to discuss the situation with the local rector Mr. Barter, the family solicitor and a cousin. George refuses to attend.
The rest of the book is about George’s parents reaction to his behaviour and how it affects their lives and the lives of those around them.
The book deals with the hypocrisy of the divorce laws, as they were then. Actually they didn’t change until fairly recently, it was much the same in the 1970s.
I don’t want to give too much away and spoil things for any would-be readers. Suffice to say that I’m glad that I read the book, although I wouldn’t read it again.
Knitting
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I was taught to knit by my mum when I was about 5 years old using teeny wee needles. Then at about the age of 7 we had to knit a tea cosy at school, a truly hideous thing. The boys did raffia work while the girls knitted.
In the 1970s there was quite a resurgence in craft work, it was all a bit hippy-ish I suppose. So knitting really took off again and I got right into the pointy sticks and became quite proficient at it.
My pride and joy was the Fair Isle jumper which I knitted for my husband around 1980 and it is still going strong after all these years of careful washing.
Fair Isle Jumper
So as you can see I wasn’t bad at knitting and the wool wasn’t too expensive then so I did quite a lot of it even although we were pretty skint (poor) back then.
Later on in the 80’s, the boys arrived with just 19 months in between them and as you can imagine there was quite a fair amount of cot blanket, bootees and matinee jacket knitting going on. Certainly for the first baby anyway – then a strange thing happened and my brain seemed to be – well I can only describe it as being ‘hijacked’, and suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on anything much beyond feeds and nappies. Our first boy hardly slept at all which didn’t help matters.
So boy number 2 hardly got anything knitted for him and the matinee jacket which I did manage is a very much plainer effort than his brother’s.
After that I just gave up for a long time and have only recently picked up the needles again, but I was really shocked to see how much knitting wool had gone up in price. I can understand that there are a lot of processes that a sheep fleece has to go through before you get to a ball of wool, but I know for a fact that the sheep farmers are getting pennies for the fleeces. It seems such a shame when they have all the hard work and worry of the sheep. In fact the farmers are being fleeced.
So what with me trying to tidy things up in the house and get rid of stuff or use it up in some way, I decided to knit with the left over bits of wool which have accumulated in various work baskets over the years. And as I’m trying to knit my way back up to Fair Isle and Aran standard again I decided to start back at the beginning with squares with a slight difference, just to make them a bit more interesting.
Wool Squares
These knitted shapes are actually described as “shells” and I found the pattern instructions in a 1940s knitting book called Modern Knitting Illustrated, which has patterns for everything that the well dressed war time person needed. Including knitted knickers (very itchy I imagine).
Use a size of needles which suits the left-over wool which you have and cast on 41 stitches and knit about 8 rows in garter stitch. Still working in garter stitch, knit 2 stitches together each side of the middle stitch, which you should mark to make life easier for you. I slip a safety pin onto the middle stitch which you can pull on to help you decide when you should be knitting 2 together. Knit the next row straight and continue in this way, decreasing in the middle of each alternate row until 3 stitches remain. Knit these 3 stitches together and fasten off.
The shells can then be sewn together to form a pattern or just randomly and it is more decorative than just plain squares.
Tags: Fair Isle, knitted squares, Knitting, knitting for beginners
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
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I’ve been trailing our copy of The Moonstone around for over 33 years and six house moves and over 500 miles then back again. So it was definitely overdue for some real attention.
The book was a school prize which my husband won for first place in science in 1967 but he claims that he has never read it.
It is basically a mystery story which was first published in 1868. There was a bit of a boom in detective stories around about the end of the First World War and at that time the genre began to be seriously discussed.
One well known novelist had the opinion that The Moonstone was probably the finest detective novel ever written. As you can imagine that gave Wilkie Collins’s books a great boost. Until then he had been seen as nothing special and quite overlooked.
Apparently Collins didn’t regard it as a mystery novel – he said “The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emergency, by a young girl supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.”
There is quite a lot of humour in the book which I must admit I hadn’t been expecting so that was a nice surprise.
At one point I asked my husband if he was sure that he had never read the book as a youngster, he denied that he ever had but I have my doubts.
When Mr. Betteredge decided to get married to his housekeeper it was because it would be more economical for him. As a housekeeper he had to pay her so much each week, but as a wife she had to give him her services for nothing.
That attitude fairly well matches my husband’s – or is that just the way with all men.
Most of the comedy is provided by Miss Clack who is a very enthusiastic Christian who spends a lot of her time trying to get people to read the tracts which she scatters liberally around the place. She reminded me very much of born again Christians who used to live next door to us.
All in all, I quite enjoyed The Moonstone although it isn’t a book which I would want to read again. Too many books to try to get through anyway and I’m looking forward to The Woman in White, of which I have heard good reports.
Scottish Words
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I had intended only doing one Scottish word each week but this week it will have to be two as they go together like fish and chips.
Skelp.
A skelp is the Scots word for a good old fashioned smack. I know that it is all terribly unPC and such but who cares. There are times when small children just have to be skelped because they are too young to reason with.
Nothing works better than a quick skelp, especially when you have just about had a heart attack as you have caught the wee darling doing something completely mental like sticking a screwdriver into an electric socket. And don’t say that the sockets should have had safety covers over them. We tried that and the kids could remove them in a second, in fact their dad had to ask them to remove the safety covers for him when he wanted to use a socket as his big fingers couldn’t get a grip on the covers to prise them off.
The word which skelped is usually followed with is the lovely word,
Bahoukie.
I think that it will be obvious what this word means. It’s a bottom or bum of course – or a backside if you prefer.
So the phrase – If you don’t watch it you’ll get a skelped bahoukie was probably one of the most used threats when I was growing up and I’m pleased to say that it hasn’t quite died out yet.
You have to be careful though as there is a cut off age – after which the threat might be used but not actually administered, especially if you have boys. After all, you don’t want them to grow up paying some “lady” to skelp their bahoukies for them.
Some good news.
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The firstborn son got the job that he really wanted yesterday. He will be starting as the website editor of a very old university soon. This has been a long time coming as he graduated over a year ago and there has been absolutely nothing coming up in the jobs market for graduates.
So, we are all thrilled to bits. I’m hoping that things are looking up for everybody else now as this recession is getting beyond a joke. It is so depressing, especially for young people who have spent years studying only to find nothing for them at the end of it all.
I wish that everyone who is arguing over how much student tuition fees should be would just remember that they got their education for free and they had student grants too.
The younger generation is going to have a hard enough time ahead of them what with paying for the mess that the irresponsible bankers have got us all into. And they probably won’t even have any sort of old age pension to look forward to at all.
