When I was 25

This was started as a writing prompt and is a powerful memory stirrer. I read Charlotte's post, which set me off reminiscing, finding some similarities and many differences in our experiences. Then even though I've already posted once today, I had to follow through, write and post before the memories faded and my 25 year old self disappeared back into the mists of time.

When I was 25, I turned my back on the full-time office job, with the travel company I was working for, and returned to the itinerant nature of tour managing, travelling with the clients on their walking holidays in Italy. I'd done one season and then accepted the office job at the end of it, which I'd coped with reasonably well over the winter months. When spring came and the other Tour Staff flew off to sunnier climes and Italian food, I chafed under the demands of office life and decided that I wasn't cut out for it after all. The decision was a huge relief and as I turned 25 I headed back to Italy to breathe the aromas of Tuscan cooking once more.

When I was 25, I had the confidence to meet a group of unknown clients at the airport and drive them off in to the countryside, with the enjoyment of their holiday entrusted into my hands. I always had pre-trip nerves, like stage fright, especially being a shy person, but I did it over and over again. I'm glad I was that person then as it gives me a memory of that ability to cope and trust in myself, to refer to now if ever I doubt my abilities.

When I was 25, I thought nothing of driving from Pisa to Oxford in 24 hours on my own in a Landrover, driving through the night on the French autoroute, sustained by Pocket Coffees (chocolates with a whole espresso concentrated into its liquid centre) with a cargo of Italian cheeses and a whole ham, unsure whether this was a legitimate import or not but driving through the Nothing to Declare at Dover anyway.

When I was 25, I had my first (and only, fingers crossed) car crash, when a new driver swerved across the road into me, writing off my beautiful butter-coloured Peugeot 205, breaking a bone in my foot and my nose and wrecking beyond redemption a beautiful soft scarf in the autumn colours of the Tuscan hills, that I'd bought in Italy. It left me with my foot in plaster for a month, back home revisiting the comfort of child-like dependance, with my mother in attendance, and appreciating the convenience of fully comp. insurance.

When I was 25, I thought I'd better catch up with my friends on the property ladder and bought a flat with a friend in London. That is where I'd been off to at the time of the car crash. Due to being immobilised for the whole month of February, I left all the house-hunting to my friend and, as time was running out before the season would be sending me off to Italy again, I found myself, without much thought on my part, a North Londoner in Willesden Green, when by inclination I subsequently discovered myself to be a South Londoner - and there is a cultural difference that goes with the divide of the Thames! I indulged myself by buying my first ever bed, double of course, even though there was no-one to put in the other side, with a wonderful pocket-sprung mattress, which has survived to this day, but is now our spare bed. The flat ended up being merely a base to return to after my stints in Italy, a winter perching place, and I got to know all the routes to South London very well!

25 was a time of being young, free and single, when my earnings could be spent on myself, and although they weren't huge, I could afford to trawl the London markets and sales for frivolous items of furniture, ridiculous clothes and bric a brac. In between intense periods of work I had cavernous spaces of free time to spend at the Everyman Cinema watching old Italian movies, explore London and read.

When I was 25, I was still five years from getting married and three years away from finding the right man, so there was an empty space, or rather, a sense of circling looking for the direction I was supposed to be heading in, I was marking time, knowing that I wanted to marry and have children one day, but not knowing what to do in the meantime, apart from experience life as it presented itself. Maybe I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more if I could have looked forward five years, but that tension of uncertainity is all part of life's rich tapestry!

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Belly Dancing

A couple of months ago, the grapevine brought to my ears rumours of a belly-dancing class being held nearby. Now belly-dancing had never been one of my ambitions, had never even entered my consciousness as a possible activity, but out here classes of any sort are few and far between. We had a yoga class going a couple of years ago, but then the teacher moved and as I am terribly un-self-motivated and need a class environmnent to keep up with any form of exercise, I relapsed back into the 'I get enough exercise running around after the kids' mode.

My informant swore that belly dancing was fun and that she came away from it feeling several inches taller. It was close by, just a few women and my son's school teacher was teaching it. So I went along and it was indeed fun. Abdominal muscles I'd forgotten ever existed came back from hibernation and I did feel taller. I was several weeks behind the others, but managed to get the hang of some of the moves. The main thing is to keep your head still while moving hips or chest muscles. It's not just about doing alarming rolls of belly muscles luckily. My favourite move is one called maya that is a hip figure-of-eight on its side, side to side.

I missed a session one week and came back to find that we were all set to give our first performance - horrors! - I was only just getting the hang of combining arm and body movements. One of the girls was leaving though and had proposed a strictly family party, combining with the drum and marimba group. They were to play for us and we would listen to them.(A marimba is a type of xylophone with wooden keys)

So yesterday, Midwinter, was the day. I'd got out a sequinned skirt, sewn a length of jingly coins onto a black top, borrowed a jingly belt (belly dancing just isn't the same without the jingles, you're making music with your hip circles), put on some eye make-up, which I'd also borrowed as it is so long since I last used mine they've practically dried up,, and driven to another farm where we were to dance on the lawn.

We had a beautiful still night with stars, after a day of the berg wind, a warm wind from the mountains that inevitably brings rain a couple of days later, but in the mean time makes it unnaturally warm for midwinter. Performance nerves were helped by the semi darkness and the minmal audience. All but two of those present were either dancing or playing drums or marimba - I'd left my family behind having their supper, as an audience of small children giggling at their teachers and mother wiggling their hips, seemed to be surplus to requirements..

We performed our set dance that we mostly remembered and kept together, except for occasional instances of landing on sprinklers, then relaxed and listened to the musicians perform. In no time our jingly hips were twitching in time to the music and we started some impromptu dancing to provide a jingly percussion for the drummers. I haven't danced so much in years. I now need to find my own jingly belt, so that I can practise at home!

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Midwinter Fire

The weather gods must enjoy our winter festivals... they certainly smiled on us last night. After a blustery Friday evening, Saturday dawned still and sunny, and stayed that way right through till the evening, which was ideal: still and starry; chilly and clear. As I'm writing on Sunday afternoon, that window of perfect winter weather slammed shut and it is raining once more, but who cares, now that the bonfire has burned to ashes and the lanterns have had their chance to shine.

Bonfire building and lantern creating kept everyone busy all afternoon and built a strong sense of community, with a deputation of children constructing an elaborate pyrotechnic volcano to be lit before the bonfire.

At lunchtime, I'd belatedly discovered my ultra-efficient notes from last year that I had forgotten even making, detailing quantities of soup and mulled wine, bread and puddings. Having failed to match the vat volume, I hurriedly threw another batch of butternut soup together, wondered about producing another batch of bread and generally pondered the catering conundrum, while the menfolk bent their minds to the important task of supporting South Africa against Australia in the Tri-Nations rugby match. Luckily we just won, so they were able to expend the rest of their energy on lanterns and fire duties.

The stunning array of lanterns were carried on sticks in a procession down an avenue of light to our circle and hung around it. Beautiful. A delicate, new, crescent moon peered over the brow of the hill at the proceedings, before shyly retiring over the horizon.

My son and his friend with two adults played a round of recorder music in the circle, with my steady hand bearing the music and a paraffin lamp, then my sister-in-law read St Francis' prayer and we all took turns to read our home-grown blessings. Then licensed pyromania erupted as the volcano was lit, sending sparks heavenwards, a multitude of sparklers whirled and the main bonfire took off, flames shooting straight up in the still night air.

Mulled wine to warm hands and stomachs, then soups, a thick butternut soup with a hint of cinnamon and a robust lentil soup, rich and smoky with ham stock, plaits of home-made white bread, and sausages braaied and eaten in rolls kept us sustained outside till the childrens' usual bedtime, then we trooped inside to see if we had any room left for puddings. It was a hard decision but everybody tried to do justice to the guava fool, chocolate pudding, jelly, apple pudding and puff pastry squares.

Two families stayed the night so the children were able to build another fire sculpture in the morning...
needless to say, they were only supplied with matches to ignite it once the adults were summonsed to provide an attentive audience!

Our house is smiling contentedly to itself today, still humming with the energy of forty friends and family, all working, talking, playing, creating and building together.

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I'm here!

Oh dear. I slipped out of the blogosphere for a moment and more than a week has gone by without a post. This remissness can partly be blamed on our internet connection going down for four days, much to our consternation. We transferred to a wireless provider, at the end of last year, to get a 24 hour connection and can see the mast with its red light blinking reassuringly on a hill a few kilometers away. Every time we fell the need to check on it we peer out from the windows at the back of our house and it's still there.

When we rang to find out why we couldn't connect on Saturday, we were told that our whole week of rain had drained the solar power cells that keep the transmiter going and that we needed some sunshine...! We duly scanned the clouds every few minutes for blue sky and wondered how long it takes to charge the batteries. On Monday when my husband was pacing the floor, frustrated in his working from home drive, they informed us that the power supply had actually been vandalised and that they were working on it...he went into work at the studio.. and the next day until, at four o'clock on Tuesday, I was able to Skype him with proof that we were back online again.

We were muttering darkly about companies who previously had had a monopoly on telecommunications trying to put their competition out of business, but the truth proved less sinister, if equally disturbing. Apparently the mast was built on common land on its hill top. Some people are squatting on the land in attempt at a land claim, which is an extremely politically sensitive matter in South Africa, and it is presumed that they vandalised the mast to retain their perceived claim on the land.

Our main concern callously being our connection to the outside world rather than politics, we were relieved that the service provider is now intending to move the mast to a nearby wine estate, which is private land and hopefully it will be less of a target there.

It took me a while to catch up reading all my Bloglines subscriptions and by then my head was thick with a cold and too sluggish to string two sentences together into a rational comment, let alone write a post of my own. So many apologies for my absence. I promise to bring you a scintillating report of this years Midwinter Festival, which we are having tomorrow. Today I am going to prepare a vat of soup, tomorrow bake several loaves of bread, then a few puddings and everyone will bring sausage to braai around the bonfire, while we drink mulled wine. I'm keeping fingers crossed for a dry evening... we've had so much rain already this winter that we can quite easily do without it for one evening without risk of drought.

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Eight Food Things

This latest food meme comes from Charlotte's Web, where Charlotte has been presiding over a long weekend baking extravaganza and setting everyone drooling with the aromas pervading the blogosphere.

Eight Food Things:

What are your favourite foods?

Besides dark chocolate? Fresh line-fish, roast lamb and roast potatoes, ripe avocado on bread with a dash of sun-dried olive paste, prosciutto crudo, home-grown strawberries and mulberries, anything someone else has cooked for me, pastry anything, marmalade, chocolate biscuits…

What foods do you hate?

Kidneys, salt-cod, anchovies

Foods you like but are embarrassed to admit:

Peanut butter and jam, Smarties, English chip-shop chips, left over chocolate butter icing…well how embarrassing is it really, to admit to an immature palate?!

Strangest food you’ve eaten and enjoyed?

Snails were fine but overrated. Probably, through lack of recent exposure to exotic cuisines with strange animal parts, the award goes to my own power-cut invention Scrambled Quiche, which experiment has yet to be repeated.

Cooking failures that still rankle?

My subconscious has deliberately blotted them out. I know there are some but the details elude me, it was obviously too painful to contemplate!

Ingredients you don’t want to consider living without?

Olive oil, garlic, butter, flour, sugar, lemons, onions, instant yeast, cocoa, oats, salt, tomatoes, wine.

Cuisine you’d like to know more about?

Asian. I wish I were more confident in whipping up a thai green curry. For some reason I'm also very hesitant about cooking with fish at home, though it is the first thing I choose in a restaurant, probably due to the reason listed below.

Foods you’ve hated but have grown to love?

Fish. As a child fish meant steamed cod for school lunch, the smell of it permeating the whole school(or so it seemed to me) . I spent the whole morning, through lessons, dreading lunch time and would even feign illness, to avoid having to face the white flaky lump that would make me gag, as I tried to swallow down the minimum requisite portion with copious glasses of water. Now I love fish - grilled, braaied, fried, sea food and all - and it is what I usually choose when we go out for a meal..not boiled cod though, ever ever ever, and preferably not in white sauce either.

Vinegar. I never really liked very strong, sour flavours, until my second pregnancy when I craved chips with vinegar. Since then I actually like the tang in French dressing, pasta sauce and if I ever eat proper chippie chips.

Current kitchen conundrum?

I'm lucky enough to have the kitchen I always dreamed of, with plenty of counters and a big long table that stretches down the room and amalgamates with the sitting room, to accommodate anything from five to fifty. The only downside I can think of, is that we have no extraction system so if I burn something (which of course is a rare event, unless the computer lures me away from the stove… OK it happens every other week) in the absence of containing walls, the whole house smells of it.

Otherwise the main oddity is the towering stack of empty yoghurt pots leaning like the Tower of Pisa next to the sink, because they are so useful that they really ought to be reused and recycled. Except, when do I think I am ever going to use up 200 empty yoghurt pots?

You're tagged if you want to be.

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Muffin Meme

Oatmeal and yogurt muffins

It's official - muffins are the new meme. This oatmeal and yogurt muffin recipe is whizzing around the globe. I saw it at Charlotte's Web in Germany, she got it from bindi nestor in Australia, who has also send it winging to other parts of the globe. The baking bug has grabbed everyone, fettered them to their stoves and turned mothers into evil witches cackling with glee, as they watch their children tucking in:

"Haha! you’re eating oatmeal, oatmeal and plain white yogurt, and you don’t even know it"quoted verbatim from Charlottes Web..except for the evil witch bit, added by an over-active imagination.

Here is the recipe at epossums. It has been documented with chocolate chips by Charlotte, coconut and strawberries in bindi's latest batch and I tried it with banana and cinnamon, which was all that I had available, that the kids would conceivably eat. I didn't want to alienate them by adding raisins - its just so labour intensive picking them all out again, for the poor dears. So to give the muffin recipe a fair trial, one mashed banana and half a teaspoon of cinnamon was added to the recipe.

The verdict: husband - "good muffin recipe"; children - "mmm, how many are we allowed"; mum - well I scoffed several more than I allowed the children, as they are decidedly moreish and with all those healthy ingredients, there just seemed no point in resisting. Part of the batch did last until the next day, so that I could assess their staying power - it only took me two more muffins to decide that really they keep very well, just as moist and chewy the day after baking and would probably be so the day after that too, if there were any left.

I tag any of you out there who haven't already baked these deceptively healthy muffins.

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Guinea-Pigs Galore

Ruby and Diamond

Ever since we lost our last guinea-pig, Squeaky 2, to death by unspecified causes, our rabbit, Speedy, has been on his own. He seemed rather depressed and lonely, as he had come to us with a guinea-pig companion. We didn't want to become inadvertant rabbit breeders, so I'd had half an ear listening out for a new guinea-pig. The friend that we'd originally got them from had had a tragedy involving a Jack Russell running amok in the small animal enclosure, pet shops seemed to be all out of guinea-pigs. A few months went by. Friends visited with their new pet, that they hadn't wanted to leave alone at home overnight, a young female rabbit! Speedy exploded from his inertia into interested action and the children came in saying "Speedy is squashing Toffee!" Any hopes that she was too young to reproduce were dismissed and they had to be kept seperately. His alertness receded after they left and he was alone once more, with only ravening dogs drooling on the other side of the wire for company, in between the children's visits.

Finally I heard that the pet shop were getting some guinea-pigs. I rang to make sure and took the children into town yesterday to look at them. There were two. A mother and a young male. The children of course loved the little one. Their mother, revealing sentimental tendencies usually well in hand around temptation to multiply the mouths to feed in our household, felt bad about leaving the mother all on her own in the pet shop. There was also a possibility she was pregnant. Fuzzy thoughts about it being nice for the children to experience baby animals clouded my judgement and we brought both home with us. Practical issues cleared the fuzziness all too quickly. Speedy was thrilled with his new companions, but showed every inclination to mate with the mother guinea-pig, regardless of species and pregnant state. The young one smelled of her so was also "squashed" intermittantly.

My hopes of them all sharing Speedy's large cage faded - I had lumbered us with the necesssity of building a new cage, possibly two to keep the male and female guinea pig apart once she has the babies. They can all share the main enclosure but we'll have to give them seperate outside time if Speedy maintains his interest in "squashing" the others. Speedy is still lonely and now frusrated as well!

I spent a while searching the internet for information on breeding guinea-pigs and on keeping rabbits and guinea-pigs together, but ended up with far too much conflicting information, plus anxiety about a, hitherto unknown to me, potentially fatal bacteria that rabbits can pass to guinea-pigs, plus the information that they have completely different body language to each other, rabbits enjoying constant grooming of each other, whereas guinea-pigs protest with vociferous squeaks. Guinea-pigs need more vitamin C than rabbits and so should eat a differently balanced diet etc etc. Ignorance was certainly bliss, as the previous Squeaky had co-existed perfectly happily with Speedy.

The children spent ages trying to find names for the new arrivals. All my food related name suggestions, such as Ginger and Fudge were rejected. Squeaky 3 was decreed to be unlucky after the short lifespan of the previous holders of the name. Eventually my son came up with Ruby and Diamond, which seemed to fit them just right.

Now we just need to build another cage and make contact with the previous owner to find out how old Ruby is and how many weeks pregnant...and maybe find a rabbit companion for Speedy - internet info mentioned that it was now common to neuter rabbits so that they could live as a pair without populating the entire neighbourhood. I don't whether that is usual here in South Africa?

Youngest also has plans to get herself a bird and some fish.............

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