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.
Thank God for Spring Sunshine and Magnolias
Walking along Half Moon Lane in Herne Hill this afternoon to see an Open Garden (beautiful; full of hellebores, forget-me-nots, wallflowers and daffodils), I recognised the sense of relief and well-being I felt last year, when I took these photos of some magnolias in Kew Gardens. See? So pleased was I to be in some sunshine after what I thought was a long, dreary winter that I pointed my camera directly at the sun to make sure it was real.
The date on these pics is March 15, which marks this spring out to be nearly a month later than last year, although, to be fair, some magnolias have already been out for a week or two. Having grown up with almost perpetual warmth and sunshine, this winter has felt like an eternity.
But before I get het up on dates and figures and what we think plants and sunshine ought to be doing at certain times of year, read this lovely piece from A Single Swallow, by Horatio Clare:
Like birds, we take our cues from seasons, from the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun. But we have formalised our calculations into a rigid but invisible web of grids, of time and space, which theoretically tell us when and where we are. The problem is that though there are many repeating mathematical patterns in nature and cosmology, the rhythms of the earth fluctuate outside the calculations we have designed to contain it…We talk of early springs and late summers as though the seasons were somehow out of joint, while it would perhaps be more logical to consider that it is our neat calendar of hours, days and weeks, with their chain of ‘seasonal’ festivals that is inaccurate.
(I’ve just spent about twenty minutes trying to find that piece which I read last night at about 1am, noted and then neglected to mark on the page. It’s on page 280, if you’re interested.)
He has a point, hasn’t he? Clare refers chiefly to swallows and their migration, which he follows through Africa from Cape Town to rural Wales, but I think it has bearing on plants, too.
Still, it doesn’t diminish my pleasure at having just cause to walk bare legged, wear sunglasses and drink ginger beer in the middle of the afternoon once more.
PS Being close to the flight path to Heathrow, I’m so enjoying the peace and quiet of not having the drone of aeroplane engines overhead at all times of day and night. That said, besides those travellers who really do have places to be, I can’t help feeling for fruit, cut-flower and vegetable farmers whose livelihoods are held ransom by a volcano on the other side of the world – and by what some would say is an untenable economic system, the vulnerability of which is now laid bare. The Guardian has an interesting piece on the subject here
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.
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