Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice
When you have spent almost an entire sunny weekend day indoors, there is nothing like popping outside and being confronted by a sea of hobbling marathon runners to make you feel like a total slug – especially if the only constructive thing you have done all Sunday is make Lemon Drizzle Cake.
Lemon Drizzle Cake? Well, it began with a homemade recipe book I bought last week at the Open Garden I mentioned in my previous post. I love homemade recipe books, especially when they are called things like Other People’s Cakes, as this one is. That said, I must admit that the recipes in this one do sound a little suggestive – Granny Meg’s Fruit Cake with Ginger, for instance, or Nellie’s Gateau au Chocolat. I’ll stop before I blush.
What got me onto making cakes this weekend was a miserable packet of malted biscuits I’d bought, earlier in the week, in the hope that they’d fill a little tea time gap. My, was I disappointed: they tasted of precisely nothing, the reason for which became abundantly clear as soon as I read the ingredients list (which I ought to have done in the first place). It was palm oil and corn syrup, rather than butter and sugar, that were sinking their way to my hips. What a shameful waste of calories.
This does, however, bring me to two blogs I’ve wanted to tell you about for some time. The first is Wandering Gaia, belonging to science and nature writer Gaia Vince,who has the kind of career I’d love were I more intrepid and better at figures. Previously an editor at Nature and then New Scientist, she’s travelling the world looking at how climate change is affecting those most vulnerable to it. She’s already visited Indonesia, where natural forest is being cleared to accommodate our palm oil habit.
The second is from über blogger and ladies’ man James Alexander Sinclair, usually of Blogging from Blackpitts, who has begun (ok, a while ago now) with some mates a blog all about biscuits. Unsurprisingly, it’s called Encounters with Remarkable Biscuits. I’d recommend a nice cup of tea and a happy hour dipping into it.
The picture is of some blossom, which I’m beginning to think is all rather too ephemeral for my good mental health. You spend months anticipating the stuff, it arrives and, before you know it, it’s over, gathering in papery drifts on the pavement. That sounds like a lot of things, actually – a slice of Lemon Drizzle Cake being one. I’d post a picture, only it’s all gone.
She’s Here!
What I loved about this spring day (yes, she’s here, spring is finally here):
Putting bed linen out on the line to dry for the first time since, er, October, and leaving the sun and wind do their work.
Making lemon cupcakes with two twelve-year-olds and realising that it doesn’t matter if the icing isn’t perfectly smooth, or that the sponge didn’t rise as much as it ought to have done. Together, butter, sugar and flour will taste good no matter what you do to them.
This year’s first tulips.
At the end of the day, a man leaning out of a top floor window and having a fag.
Hearing a delivery man wish a customer well with her pregnancy.
The deep-plum leaves of a prunus against a sage-green wall.
To the west, the sun setting over a hundred chimney tops, which made me think of this:
Catching Up
Shall I let you in on a secret? There is a very useful tool on these WordPress dashboards. It is a function that allows you to write a string of blog posts, save them, and set WordPress to post them at a date of your choosing.
I have been toying with the idea of using this, of settling down one Sunday afternoon and taking care of a month’s writing in one sitting, for some time now. It would certainly be convenient and spare you the frustration of seeing stale pages for days on end but, somehow, to the small percentage of perfectionist in me, being so efficient feels like cheating. And surely you would know.
Wouldn’t you?
No. We Hamblys are made of sterner stuff and from now on I resolve to be more regular in my posting. “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,” our Grandpa Fred always used to say.
It does fall on me to add, however, that I have thought of you often this past month while I have been holed up, working in-house on someone else’s Mac, and unable to do my usual amount of blogging.
My head has been ticking over with all sorts of things, though. This is some of what’s been on my mind:
A pretty, patterned blouse and cashmere jumper that I bought from Traid recently in the name of research for this. I have also popped up here and, golly, even here.
The roses. Oh! The roses. I know every gardener has their own take on pruning but I suspect I have been a little too enthusiastic with the lopper-thingys too late in the season. If ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ does put in an appearance this summer, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Butter biscuits and whether it’s appropriate to use a recently acquired reindeer biscuit cutter in April. What do you think? At last count – last week – I had 19 different cutters and I haven’t bought a single one of them. I think my friends are hinting.
Rare-breed chickens and whether they would survive Brixton’s pitbulls and foxes, not to mention my landlords. Probably not.
Whether spring will ever arrive properly.
Treacle, the Newfoundland dog, who is giving my fella a run for his money. ‘Look,’ said Fella the other day. ‘I don’t say I don’t do this but I bet Treacle makes awful smells in bed.’
The picture of the daffodils was taken inside Blythburgh church, Suffolk, last weekend.
Fruits of the Year
I’ll not deny it: in the context of Bloglandia it’s been an age since I last posted. I’m not sure how the past month went by so quickly, but it did and, by gum, we’re almost at the end of the year. Apologies if you’ve visited recently, especially if you came here from my post on the Guardian gardening blog, and found no-one at home.
Being away from home is not that far-fetched a metaphor, actually. At the moment I’m a hemisphere away from wintry Brixton, in the depths of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa. My soundtrack this evening isn’t the perpetual scream of south London’s emergency vehicles but rather a summer chorus of bats, frogs and night birds. To my delight, my feet, legs and arms are bare, even though I’m outside on the veranda.
What, then, does a picture of marzipan fruits and well-worn cake decorating accoutrements have to do with anything? Well, I’m home for the holidays, and this afternoon it fell upon us to decorate – admittedly rather belatedly – the Christmas cake. No matter that it was 32 degrees outside and that it would have been more appropriate to spend the afternoon in the swimming pool – there are some traditions that must be maintained at all costs.
We mutter about this, of course, because we know that eating vastly calorific food intended for northern winters, rather than southern summers, is peculiar, to say the least.
It’s also true that most ritualised practises shift over time and space, and I doubt our simple Christmas bears much resemblance to the original English variety, just as our childhood diet of fabled England – cream teas, If, the Famous Five, country houses, Colin Firths and Hugh Grants – leaves modern England wanting.
This year our wire tree is decorated almost exclusively with Zulu beadwork and I don’t think a Brussels sprout has ever graced our diningroom table. The timing of our meal was based entirely on the weather report and whether it would be cool enough at midday for a heavy lunch. Earlier in the week our neighbourhood carol singers arrived wearing Father Christmas hats and sang in beautiful Zulu harmony.
Yet to abandon our annual Christmas ritual, handed down over generations, would be unthinkable. At the very least it would loosen the roots that anchor us in the soil of our past, and link us to my family’s ancestors, who packed and unpacked their bags in India, Australia and most of southern Africa, and, in the spirit of that time, took with them and adapted to local conditions the small, comforting traditions of ‘home’ wherever they went.
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