Catch-Up Meme

How to fill the hole of a whole month's absence from my blog? Instead of wringing my hands and apologising madly for being such a bad blogger, citing reams of extenuating circumstances, I should of course take a leaf from Special Agent Gibbs' book in NCIS, his rule number 9 being 'Never Apologise'. So I shall just swan in and borrow Meredith's meme designed for catching up with friends you haven't seen for fifteen years in ten simple bullet points. Fifteen years/one month... the answer has to be bullet points:

1. The rest of our time in England was packed full of seeing old friends, most of whom we hadn't seen at all since we moved to SA. It was wonderful how easy it was to pick up the threads again as if no time has passed and so great to see them all. Each of our children got to meet one of their name-parents (our equivalent of god-parents) again for the first time in about three or four years, and it was amazing to see that they still had an instant close connection with them, following them around and climbing all over them as if they'd seen them every day of their lives.

2. From a quiet Somerset village we went to stay for one night in a friend's North London flat in a street full of take-aways. The novelty of pizza and Chinese, the thrill of nipping down to the shop two doors down at eight o'clock in the evening for milk and butter for breakfast had me bouncing around like a kid playing house, but after a noisy night filled with London traffic and pub closing time I was very happy to be moving on - even though I was leaving my husband to several more nights of take-away food and noise, while he stayed in the big smoke for some work meetings.

3. We went to North Norfolk to a typical seaside town. The children invested their pocket money in shrimping nets and we had one perfect sunny morning on the beach, building castles and looking in rock pools. The other windy, cool and rainy days we spent riding on a steam train, walking in some amazing rhododendron woods, playing croquet and trawling the souvenir shops in an agonizingly slow pocket-money spending-spree.

4. We discovered the joys of Satnav borrowing our friends' Tomtom to talk us into and around South London. Apart from the fact that I was concentrating so hard on it that I missed a turn that I used to know off by heart, it worked well and the novelty of it kept us all entertained for ages. It did have a major wobble once on our return journey when it tried to send us back into London again, instead of the road we knew we were supposed to take. We almost followed it and then rumbled its cunning plan and got ourselves back on the right road again, much to its annoyance.

5. We had a totally touristy day out in central London and introduced the children to the joys of trains, the tube and London buses, took in the dinosaurs in the Natural History museum and ate ice cream in Trafalgar Square. We even took a cab and asked the driver to take us to Victoria Station via Buckingham Palace, thus underlining the fact that we are no longer cool Londoners. The children were rather disappointed by Buck House - not their idea of a palace at all.

6. The first thing that struck us when we reached home was how enormous our house felt after all the houses we'd stayed in in England. It has since shrunk back to its normal size and feels just right again now.

7. Role reversal on the domestic front as a big re-writing and editing project has chained me to the computer for the last two weeks and my husband has been doing the school run both ways to give me more time to work.

8. Middle Daughter's birthday that she had in England this year still had to be celebrated with a party at home complete with treasure hunt and cake, so last weekend was spent composing a butterfly treasure hunt and the weather co-operated with sun-shine and the first white daisies flowering.

9. Middle Daughter finally had the dental surgery that we agonised over for so long and then postponed for months because she had a cold every time it was booked. The whole general anaesthetic thing was majorly stressful for both parents and not something that I want to have to do again with any of my children if I can possibly help it, but she is fine, her teeth are fine now and it's over.

10. We've been ODing on NCIS watching series 3 at a rate of two episodes per night, every night and then being so horrified at Gibbs' apparently retiring that we had to go out and buy the next series for my husband's birthday present. Nothing like a bit of stress, drama, corpses and tension to make you look forward to your evenings on the sofa in front of a fire.

Normal blog service should now be resumed and I may even get round to posting some photos, I've hardly even looked at them yet myself. Lots of love and thanks to everyone we saw, as well as those we didn't quite manage to meet up with this time. It was great to go back to England and after the initial disorientation it's great to be home again too.

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In Memory

On Saturday we had the memorial service for my father, held at the school where he was headmaster for 23 years and where we grew up. There was a huge turn out of over 200 old pupils, teachers and people who had worked at the school in his day, as well as family, friends and even ex-pupils and colleagues from his previous schools. There were some wonderful speeches, which will have let him know just how much he was appreciated by his former pupils and which brought back many memories for us all.

The quote of the day went to my 2 year old niece, who we’ve met for the first time on this visit. During the service she noticed all the people behind her, who had bowed their heads for the prayers. “Everybody hiding!” she observed in delight, thrilled with this new game!

Thinking July meant sunshine we’d all planned on wearing summer outfits and debated whether tights would be too hot on a sunny day, but we needn’t have worried - it was rained upon in true English style! There is something about the English character that comes up trumps in the face of adverse weather conditions and maintains a wonderful note of optimism by continuing to plan outdoor events, with a balmy idea of floating around in summer dresses on green lawns, Pimms or scones and tea in hand, despite the frequent realities of shivering in cotton frocks under ineffectual umbrellas. Our memories hold on to some universal ideal of croquet, tennis or picnics under blue skies and endless sunny evenings, despite the fact that the last really long, hot summer we can reliably remember was in 1976, when bathwater was rationed in my first term of boarding school!

The idea had been that after the service the old pupils, parents and friends would be able to wander around the present day school and watch the children playing tennis, cricket and any other sports that would be going on, enjoy strolling around the gardens and woods before sauntering over to the front of the old building where tea would be served on the lawn. As the service drew to a close the light pattering of rain on the sports hall tin roof crescendoed to raindrops drumming overhead and everybody scurried over to the main building and crowded into the old school hall for tea, creating a convivial but well sandwiched atmosphere!

The girls did wear the pretty summer dresses and sandals that my mother had bought them for the occasion, just adding leggings underneath and, even though the rain lashed down at a fierce angle, had plenty of fun running around the building and making raids on the sumptuous plates of sandwiches, cakes and biscuits that were piled high on trestle tables around the hall.

I don’t think any of us stopped talking for a moment after the service, as there were so many people we hadn’t seen for years coming up to introduce themselves, shake hands and say nice things about him. I haven’t had enough practise being in the spotlight and did my best to carry off the role of ‘family’, but there is a certain skill needed to conclude one conversation gracefully as new people keep coming up to start another one, besides the challenge of trying to recognise people you haven’t seen for twenty years. There just wasn’t enough time to have proper catch up conversations with other members of the family either, but it was still lovely to see everyone and there was a real buzz to the occasion too.

The day before we had been over to the school to set up a display of photos, both of my father and of my children’s school in South Africa (as we are setting up a fund in his memory to sponsor the school fees of one or more children there), and we took the kids with us so they could see where my brother and I had grown up.

The school has grown a lot since then, with new buildings built over the vegetable gardens and double the number of children, but once we had signed in and put on a Visitors badge in accordance with EC regulations, we were allowed to go exploring and found that much of the original building is still much the same, so we could show them all our old hiding places, including the trap door in the ceiling of the linen cupboard leading to the roof space, which was the one that intrigued them the most!

It was amazing how much the feel of the place was the same, despite many new buildings in the grounds. The same stone flagged corridor in the kitchen passages, the same polish smell of the wooden floors of the hall, even the same oil smell in the cellars from the boilers that run the central heating system. There is something about the building that retains its friendly family feel. It must be soaked into the warm golden stone that went into the original manor house 150 years ago when the local squire built it for his family. Try as the pupils might to conjure up some spooky ghost stories to tell after lights out, they never can make them really convincing, as the house just doesn’t have that shivery feel of being haunted.

I had to keep restraining the urge to show the kids all the out of bounds areas, like the way out to climb on the rooves, strictly forbidden of course and probably dangerous, but it would have been fun to show them where our names are carved in the lead … it must have been my teenage self calling to me, partially left behind there in the stones of the place where I grew up!

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Rainy Days Out

We spoke to the family in South Africa today and it has been raining solidly for four days there – good solid winter rain filling the reservoirs to overflowing, just as it should do on a good year.

Here it has been raining too – English summer rain guaranteed to pour down in torrents whenever an outside event is planned in July! It was Middle Daughter’s birthday last week. For the first time in her memory, being away from home, we broke with tradition and didn’t have a birthday party with treasure hunt for her birthday, but organised an outing instead to Monkeyworld in Dorset, which is an amazing primate rescue centre that the children have seen for years watching the programme Monkey Business on Animal Planet.

Her birthday dawned overcast and showery looking and, mind in Africa-mode, I wondered whether we should postpone the outing, picnic lunch and all for a finer day. I’d forgotten that in England you go ahead anyway, that there might not be a finer day for weeks! We actually had a lovely time. The intermittent showers saw us sheltering under cover listening to a keeper’s talk on Woolly Monkeys, or picnicking under the covered terrace of the café, or stopping for an ice cream under a wonderful African-inspired, thatched boma. In between we were able to see several of the animals that the kids knew from watching the series and listen to a few more keeper’s talks, watch the troop of ring-tailed lemurs and the baby chimps. At the end the sun came out in full force and dried up the rain so the children were able to clamber over the rope structures in the playground too, with bright patches of blue sky behind them.

Talking about the experience on the way home our son was conservative in his praise – we’d seen it all from the visitors’ perspective and it was interesting but he thought it was better to see it from the keeper’s perspective on Animal Planet, he said. It’s a shame that reality doesn’t quite live up to TV… The girls decided that if they got left behind they’d go and live in the lemur enclosure as they liked the sound of their diet, as described by the keeper – fruit and nuts definitely beat the capuchin monkeys’ mixed diet with frogs featured on the menu!

More rain today with drenching showers demanded drastic measures to get the children out of the house, which is just a little too small for them to be cooped up in all day long. We took them out willy-nilly to Yeovilton Air Museum, completely ignoring Middle Daughter’s protests that she didn’t want to go and see some old aeroplanes.

She did manage to rustle up a little interest in flying some of the model planes and seeing how the controls on a harrier work and also survived the simulation experience of being on board an aircraft carrier, with all the noise and mayhem of planes landing and taking off. Youngest even said afterwards that it was nice . The hardest part of the experience was in manoeuvring through the gift shop at the end, with £1 pocket money burning a hole in their purses. Finding anything desirable at that price was well-nigh impossible and we ended up comparing the relative merits of pencils and rubbers, pens and notepads. The decision process took at least twenty minutes, by which time we were desperate to get home for a cup of tea and found that the sun had come out at last. Maybe it will shine for our next trip out on Wednesday, but I'm not betting as much as a souvenir pencil with keyring attached on that as a certainty!

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WTSIM Summer Pudding

It still seems so strange to be spirited into the middle of an English summer, the weirdest thing being the evenings that stay light until ten o’clock. The children are in bed, but still wide awake and chatting away, unconvinced that it really is bedtime, even though it’s way past their normal time.

We’ve had soft summer weather, some sun, some cloud, a threat of drizzle that fades to nothing, warm enough for T-shirts, with a gentle breeze now and then that teases you into a warm top, if you stay still too long. It’s hard to remember that we still need to wear sunscreen even under a cloudy sky.

Out in the garden the children have discovered wild strawberries nestling under their leaves and found that they are only sweet once they are red all round - the one in the photo looks completely plastic but tasted wonderful!

Today was the village street fair and my mother had our roles all organized – our son was to run the marble race that Grandpa used to do every year, with a wooden marble run that takes two marbles hurtling down parallel to see which is the fastest. She ended up manning it herself most of the time, as he wandered around watching all the other attractions.

I helped on the bric a brac stall and took my children’s money from them as they repurchased several of the things that we had donated, including half my old keyring collection! They couldn’t believe the purchasing power of three quid in bric a brac and have now amassed a collection of ceramic birds, soft toys, little boxes, cushions, bags and stuff that will need to be fitted into their cases on the return journey … I was kept so busy inventing prices for pots, ceramic knick-knacks, a playstation and all sorts, that I didn’t take any photos at all, even of my two older children, who had been persuaded into presenting the bouquets, after the fair had been pronounced open.

The hardest part was clearing up at the end, when we had to sort the leftovers into piles for the dump or to take to a charity shop. It was hard for me to send anything to the dump, when it was perfectly good to use still. In South Africa there is always someone who will be able to use something, however well-worn it is. Here we had to send a load of mismatched glasses and unwanted electrical goods to the dump, as nobody could think of anyone who would take them off our hands.

When I saw the theme of this month’s WTSIM event hosted by Jeanne was Berried Treasure, I knew that I’d be making a Summer Pudding at least once after I got here and in fact my mother had already planned one for this weekend, just in time for the deadline.

It has always been one of our favourite family puddings, the epitome of an English summer. Purple berry juices transforming stale bread into a luscious, jeweled slice of flavour to be smothered in cream and savoured. The classic version has redcurrants and raspberries in I think, but ours has always majored on blackberries, with raspberries and loganberries and had apple in to bulk out the berries. Blackberries are really an early autumn berry but my father was always an industrious gleaner from the hedgerows and usually picked enough to freeze for the rest of the year. You can use any sort of berries for this but they need an edge of sharpness, so strawberries and blueberries on their own would be too bland and sweet.

Summer Pudding Recipe

500g / 1 lb mixed berries

500g / 1 lb cooking apples

½ - 1 cup sugar

1 loaf stale white bread

These quantities are approximate, as it depends on the size of the bowl you use and how many berries you have. This does a medium size pudding basin. The sugar needs to be added to taste as the berries vary in sweetness. You are aiming to sweeten them enough to be pleasant but not sickly sweet.

Slice the bread thickly and cut off the crusts. Line a pudding basin with the slices, patch-working them together so that there are no gaps.

Peel, core and chop the apples and put them in a pan with a little water and sugar and stew gently for 5-10 minutes until starting to soften. Add the berries, which can still be frozen, and plenty of sugar.

Warm them over a medium heat, but don’t let them boil. As soon as a simmer is reached they are usually already tender enough, as you want the berries to retain their shape.

Spoon the stewed berry mixture into the bread-lined bowl until they are level with the top of the bread. Any left over juice can be kept to pour over it later. Put a layer of bread slices on top to seal in the berries.

Put a saucer or small plate that just fits into the top of the bowl on top of the bread layer and weight it, so that the berries are compressed and the juice soaks into the bread. Leave it for at least twelve hours and make sure that it stays weighted down.

Serve by turning the pudding onto a plate and pouring over a little of the leftover juice wherever the bread still shows white. Serve with double cream.

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Five Habits Meme…

I was tagged by Tanya to do the Five Habits Meme, so here goes…

What was I doing 10 years ago?
Our son has just turned ten, so ten years ago I was living in our London photographic studio, sleeping in the mezzanine over the main studio and looking after our new baby in the office mostly, whenever the studio was hired out, and spending lots of time walking round Battersea Park with him in the pram. The best thing about living in the studio was that there was always another pair of hands around to hold the baby. The worst, the fact that the phone would ring, or else the very loud doorbell, just when he was about to go to sleep, so I always used to take hime out in the park to get him to sleep. He was also good at sleeping in the car, so spent a lot of time asleep in his carseat on the kitchen table of the studio kitchen/office.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non-weight gaining world:
1. Chocolate.
2. Freshly baked bread still warm from the oven, slathered in butter.
3. Rediscovered in England this trip – McVities chocolate digestives – plain chocolate of course!
4. Cake – of practically any description – if any of you need help finishing up Christmas cake at Easter, I’m the person to invite to tea!
5. Italian pasticceria – but it’s been so long I can now only imagine the flavours...

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
Same as Charlotte and Tanya.. all of the above…
AND…
1. Raw carrot sticks as I chop them for supper.
2. Crunchies, rusks or whatever home-made biscuits I have managed to bake that week. I’ll eat the shop- bought ones, but with the exception of the ones mentioned above, which are not available at home that I know of ( or if they are would be ridiculously expensive), I don’t really enjoy them that much, eating them is more a habit that I can’t quite chuck.
3. Raisins
4. Naartjies – especially clementines.
5. Bread and marmalade – both home-made.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy homes for all the immediate family that don’t already have their own...
2. Fund our children’s school with all the buildings they need and sponsor all the children that need it now, so that they can all keep their places secure and so that the teachers can be paid as they deserve. Then help it develop a middle and high school, so that the kids can go all the way through.
3. Travel first class, with beds that fold out, so that we can all sleep on the flight over here! A private jet would be attractive, but my eco-principles might hold me back!
4. Eat out in all the wonderful restaurants that I possibly can, at home and abroad.
5. Build a dam on our property, so that my husband can have the water he craves, or else buy a farm with a river or a lake on it.

Five jobs I have had:
1. Advertising production assistant on a computer magazine for about three months.
2. Tour Manager for a travel company in Italy.
3. Photographer’s assistant to a shoe photographer.
4. Running our photographic hire studio, after I met my husband.
5. Freelance writer

Five habits:
1. Clicking on Bloglines, when I get stuck writing something and distract myself with someone’s blog for a minute or two.
2. Grabbing a handful of raisins, whenever I pass the kitchen counter.
3. Twiddling my hair.
4. Bursting into song whenever a phrase reminds me of a song I know – usually from the late Seventies or Eighties – very annoying for my children.
5. Trying to be exactly on time for everything, which usually translates as being several minutes late, as I usually forget something and have to run back for it.

Five places I have lived:
1. Somerset
2. Rome
3. Battersea, London
4. Streatham Common, London
5. A farm outside Cape Town

Five people I’d like to get to know better:
Caffienated Cowgirl
Hen
Mary Alice
Rose & Thorn
AliceBand

consider yourself tagged!

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Oh to be in England!

Green… burgeoning, blossoming green, the English countryside in full flood of a generously watered summer. Trees billowing over hillsides, clouds billowing in the sky. Busy roads, speed traps, impatient drivers beeping, as I struggle with the gears of the hire car. Winding country lanes, one car wide, lined with lacy white cow parsley, jagged with stinging nettles, tall hedges blocking the view except at farm gates, which give glimpses of low rolling hills, patchworks of fields, spreading endlessly to the horizon.

We got here safely and survived the first leg to Jo’burg, despite the fact that our son discovered that he suffers from motion sickness in planes and moaned and groaned into a sick bag for the second half of the flight. Luckily our stop-over at Jo’berg enabled us to dash to the pharmacy for pills to quell the nausea and the endless miles to walk between Domestic and International, the maze of confusing signs, specially designed to employ several staff just to stand around and field bewildered travellers, gave plenty of opportunity to re-acquaint our feet with the ground and get our circulation going in preparation for the next ten hour stint.

Their aunt had thoughtfully provided activity bags with colouring books, puzzle books, crayons and pencils, which helped pass the time and the moving pavements kept the kids busy at the boarding gate, as they went round and round, backwards and forwards. Nobody managed more than three hours sleep on the plane, but had the novelty of being allowed to watch unlimited movies on the in-flight system and we discovered The Golden Compass, the movie of the Philip Pullman novel, which was excellent. I even switched over to it, as it was miles better than the lame romantic comedy that I’d started off with!

Arrival at Terminal 5 provided more opportunities for exercise, with the transit train not working, but the kids had survived the flight in good spirits and stepped out gamely. We even made it through passport control, with Youngest on her SA passport, putting on her standard ‘looking at strangers’ frown. Then came a friend meeting us for breakfast, mango smoothie wiping out two of Youngest’s spare outfits, the trek to the hire car place and a struggle with fitting three car seats into the back of the medium estate car we’d booked. Our oldest son was resigned to the indignity of a booster seat, but we just couldn’t fit three seats in a row. The arms of the booster seats interlocked and jabbed into the next child. In the end we took him back into the hire office and lined him up against the measuring chart. His head was close enough to the line that he’d pass muster, with marginally thicker shoe soles, so we handed the one booster seat back, feeling like we were living dangerously, in this newly regulated land of three points off your license for the slightest misdemeanour.

Finally we headed out of Heathrow’s concrete jungle, towards the lush green hills of Somerset. The kids slept most of the way, waking only to see Stonehenge through sleep-blurred eyes.

None of them had any clear memories of Granny’s house, our son only remembering playing on the stairs and that the carpet had been green then, so much exploring had to be done and discovering of Mummy’s old toys that had come down from the attic specially to meet them.

They’ve had a busy two days settling in and we even braved the shops to change the wellie boots that Granny had got them for different sizes (with more symptoms of motion sickness discovered in Youngest, though that was probably due to my less than smooth driving as I struggled to discover the optimum gear ration and grappled with the multiple roundabouts, speed limits and traffic of the metropolis of Yeovil!) – they’re jolly fancy ones too here, with fairies and fashion victim girls and camouflage patterns adorning them, much prettier than the bog standard blue ones from our local farmers coop at home.

Granny had arranged for our son to get some cricket with the local boy’s cricket club yesterday and there’s the village street fair on Saturday, so they’re being plunged into English village life already. Middle Daughter said yesterday that she wouldn’t mind living here. Right now they are having a raucous time with a wooden marble run that is now on its third generation of kids and the sound of cascading marbles is echoing around the house from the upstairs landing. Watch your footing as you reach the top of the stairs as one misplaced marble could have you cascading down them too.

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Bright Sparks and Lanterns

Work projects complete. Tick.

Winter Festival over for another year. Tick.

Packing is the allotted task for today.

For tomorrow we fly!

We woke yesterday to the sounds of rain on the roof, children wondering how we could possibly have our winter festival inside.

"It's sure to stop later," I reassured them, "every year we have some rain on the day and then it is always clear enough when it comes to taking the lanterns into the sandpit and lighting the bonfire."

Sure enough the rain did stop, a few rays of sunshine even emerged and it was warm. I optimistically hung out a load of washing and carried on making soup.

Various friends cried off at the last minute, due to children being sick and the thought of damp evenings outdoors not seeming an ideal way to speed their recovery, so we were a select group of about twenty in the end.

Bonfire built, lanterns decorated, wine mulled, soup simmering, we gathered in the damp dusk with lit lanterns and then carried them down the river of light to our circle.

The air was mild and gaps in the cloud let a few stars peek through. Serving up soup and mulled wine,wrapped in layers we were almost too hot and remarked that even at Midwinter it didn't have that foot numbing chill, traditional to Bonfire Night in England.

The kids had a ball with sparklers and a home-made volcano in the sand, the bonfire was eventually coaxed into roaring skywards and the rain generously held off until the sausages were cooked, when its mild drizzle got more enthusiastic and drove us back indoors.

I had made puddings for forty, so after all the soup, bread and sausages we barely made a dent in them. Today looks like a festival of packing and puddings, not to forget of course dipping the dogs whose fleas have been keeping them and us awake and restless at night!

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