Travel

Signature Dishes – a Lyric Essay

humanist55

A signature dish usually has a story
Rooting its cook in the time and place
Where it was acquired and from whom…

Palaver Sauce was my first glorious excursion into cooking in a different way, and I brought it out at dinner parties for many years and told its story. The American professor of West African studies who taught my fellow student and I to stew the things which convention would say ought not to go together, red meat and white, and salt fish…

Goat—funkier than lamb, nearer to mutton
Chicken – chopped in chunks still on the bone
Salt Dried Cod – ancient African currency that once bought slaves
Spinach sauce rich with garlic and chilli
Turmeric, my own addition.

Palaver is the Portuguese word for quarrel but there is no argument once cooking’s worked its magic.

My old boss Tony, took me for a meal in Manchester, in a church converted to a hotel and restaurant with a swimming pool in the Lady Chapel and Venison Marinated in Strawberry and Stilton on the menu.
Tony gave me my first job as a cook—I will not honour it with the title chef.
Ratatouille
Chilli con Carne
Six Quiches, various
and six buckets of salad each morning
developed my skills and gave me staples so that years later when I opened my own restaurant, Frewin’s, The Carroll Hotel long gone, I sentimentally made that Venison dish my own signature, menu centrepiece…

Small things can make a signature dish
I nestle walnuts into Apple Crumble topping
For who thinks of roasting walnuts
Yet how delicious is this tiny touch
Browned at the crown but protected from burning
A rival to its cousin Pecan Pie.

But crumble never overtook Bread and Butter Pudding at Frewin’s – I made a rod for my own back with that one, so often was it ordered, but at least it could be made at a moment’s notice – the ingredients always to hand…

Buttered Brioche bread
Cream
Milk
Eggs
Veins of sugar and raisins interleaved

Ramekins into the microwave until the mix began to rise and then into the oven to swell and brown – the look on diners faces when the souffle impersonating dessert arrived hot foot…

Christmas Dinner for the whole family, though a favourite feast, is my least favourite meal to cook – all logistics and creativity giving way to tradition. Yet special meals are not always for the many, once, I spent a quiet Christmas with just my sister, Carol, in a town in Roscommon where a halal meat packing plant had populated the place with Pakistanis and the supermarket shelves with foodstuffs I could have found back home in “Bradistan*”.
I decided to treat Carol to a “desi**” breakfast such as we had both enjoyed in Bradford. Such fun making wholemeal, spinach pooris, flicking the wrist to spin the disks discs like frisbees, into the deep fat fryer – watching them inflate like little green footballs then eating the curry and lime pickle with pooris and fingers, not forks and spoons.

Also at Carol’s command
I recreated a Victorian favourite
Sussex Pond…
Suet Raisin pastry
Crudely thrown together
Roughly rolled out
To line a plastic bowl
A chopped-up lemon
And equal weights of
Butter and muscovado
The filling in and
Pastry top crimped down –
Four minutes in the microwave
Is all it took and
When the pudding –
Turned out on a plate
Was cut into – out poured the
Pond water, rich and brown
Its sweetness offset by
The chunks of lemon.
This too graced my restaurant
Tables for special guests
With suitable appetites for
Suet pudding – I promised
To deliver in just twelve minutes
Start to finish and
I never lost my race…

Food is life, and love, and comfort
and is it any wonder that
it generates stories
rooted in people, places
traditions and relationships
flavours and feasts remembered…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

* So many Pakistanis came to work in the mills of Bradford, that it was sometimes referred to as Bradistan.

** from the Sanskrit word “Desh” meaning “country”. The word “Desi” refers to something “from the country” and so for Pakistanis in Bradford, it means things from the old country – desi food, desi calendars, and desi dress.

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, in Poetics: Satiating the Soul, Punam invites us to celebrate any or all of the things that go to make up the Hindu festival of Diwali – cleaning the house, preparing food, and celebrating the festival of Light with friends, family and everyone else…

I have been intrigued for some time, by the idea of the lyric essay and have bought books by Claudia Rankine and Kathleen Graber as examples, but the form is as slippery as a fish and impossible to pin down. Writers.com begin a very good attempt at definition by saying “Lyrical essays explore the elements of poetry and creative nonfiction in complex and experimental ways, combining the subject matter of autobiography with poetry’s figurative devices and musicality of language.” This is my first serious attempt at the form…

It’s Time to Divorce the Car…

humanist55

It’s time to divorce the car!
The car is killing the planet

Cars and ships and planes too
Busses and  bikes are healthier alternatives

The health of the planet needs us to be healthier
You can’t walk away from this but you should walk more

Walk, cycle, car-share if you must, help yourself to help the planet
The time for tinkering with changing lightbulbs is in the rear-view mirror

A rear-view mirror magnifies the causes of global warming
but now is the time to look forward and act decisively

It is not just governments that need to act but you!
Changing your relationship with your car will be hard

The solutions are multifaceted but
For you, it’s simply time to divorce the car!

Generated in Midjourney

© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Responding to Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: over at dVerse Poets Pub…

A Tale of Two Trips…

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We travelled twice to Crete
once was a holidayof two weeks
once was something different for six months.
The first time we stayed with
my sister-in-law and her partner
who gave up their bed
for her sister and I.

We hired a car
and left him to his work
and her to hers
rescuing cats
thankless by Cretans
and we travelled that corner of Crete
the lofty coast road south to Sitia
great banks of flowering shrubs
in their pomp
painting our way
giving glimpses of the empty sea
blue below.
Returning, the sunset meal
above a dizzying drop
down to the sea
and opposite the entrance
the coolest water flowing silently
into a trough
out of the heart of the mountain.
We gazed in awe at the Ha Gorge
where only younger people
in wetsuits might slide down
from pool to pool
and then not without risk
to life and limb.

In the year of the pandemic
in September, the disease settling in
for the long haul and we
periodically locked down
made an escape before borders
clanged firmly shut
at the sister-in-law’s suggestion
because Crete had no cases
and the winter would be warmer
than that in England
and we could keep company
installed in a winter vacant flat next door.
Two weeks in
Crete locked down
with a decisive severity
at odds with England’s ‘s Boris led
shilly-shallying silliness
even though Crete was almost Covid free
and England certainly was not!

The winter, as promised
as warm as an English summer
as befits a country
a mere stone’s throw from Africa
with only the occasional storm
thundering around the many mountains.
Oh! We had a grandstand view
from our apartment in Elounda
the sun bursting up across the bay
the evening light rendering
the mountains purple and gold
so crisply shadowed
you felt you could reach out
across twenty miles
and touch their roughness
where they fought
a losing battle against the elements
solid slabs descending into slopes of scree.

But when all was said and done
we were trapped in a gilded cage
on a short leash at best
allowed to local shops
suitably masked and sidestepping
others in a semblance of social distancing
but longer trips forbidden
more living but less sightseeing.

And yet…
on my solitary exercise walks
down to the two town supermarkets
I watched the tiny Cretan olives
ripen to purple-blackish bloom
the family bubbles
spread the nets beneath the trees
and mechanically flail
the harvest to the ground
afterward – pruning-burning bonfires
raising columns of smoke
all over the island
and eventually I saw
the tiny olive flowers
blossom to make next year’s crop
sights you wouldn’t see
on a two-week holiday.

My reward when I reach the town
a masked conversation
with the supermarket’s owner
at her checkout
an unexpected Pink Floyd superfan
telling of a last ticket
last minute flight
to see the group play
an ancient Athens amphitheatre
whilst I exchange a treasured memory
of the week I worked for the group
in the run-up to the premiere of The Wall
my bucket list never saw that coming!
I add the memories
and many photos
to my store.

We do not look back on it
as a holiday
more time served
under lockdown
albeit in a beautiful cell
and though we can say
we lived in Crete for six months
it was not life as we know it…

Posted for dVerse Poets Pub to the prompt Vacation. We don’t use the word vacation so much as holiday if I may be permitted…
© Andrew Wilson 2023

In Crete

humanist55

 The quandary over holiday v. living continues… We are experiencing some “survivor guilt” combined with some separation anxiety in regard to family back in England not to mention friends – we feel blessed to be somewhere so paradisial (mosquitos excepted) whilst family and friends must fight through an English winter made worse not just by the counter-Covid measures themselves, but by the stress of watching an inept, misguided and venally self-serving government bluff and badger their way through the crisis. At present, the local governments of the North of England have been demanding more money to help the afflicted if they must go into stricter measures again and the government are ploughing ahead anyway. This is really a battle against the “power-grabbing to the centre” of the Dominic Cummings led government and quite rightly so – nor is this dilemma solely being enacted in Britain but in many countries around the world including here in Greece…

On the “living in Greece” side – we have attended a wedding of our next-door neighbours – him Greek her Russian, their baby so was baptized following the wedding- a beautiful church whose interior was completely covered in paintings of saints, bishops, and disciples. Followed by dancing at the wedding feast – limited to 50 attendees – so more than thrilled to have been invited. My partner’s sister’s partner was doing the catering for the event.


Furthermore, we have begun to learn the language in the contemporary manner – using the app Duolingo! Whilst choosing a suitable app  – came across Busuu which is named for a language whose native speakers had dwindled to a mere eight before the app (which unfortunately doesn’t cover Greek) offers the chance to learn Busuu as well as a small selection of other languages – so now there are presumably more speakers – who knows, perhaps like the native American tribe used for communications during WW2, there is a society of surreptitious Busuu speakers defying the eavesdroppers on the internet, whispering sweet nothings to one another or who knows what!!!

On the “going home eventually” side of the coin, our funds are finite and life is not cheap here and of course, Brexit still looms…

Nevertheless, we have been here over a week now and some sort of “new normal” begins to emerge.


Locusts…

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It is not my intention to make this a nature blog, but when a locust, an animal of mythical status quite literally, drops into your hand, or to be precise, onto the USB cable you have in your hand – it is worthy of a photo at least. They do occur in small or rather, regular numbers here in Crete but I understand they rarely get triggered into the massive swarms possible in nearby Africa. A quick search of the internet shows there are many species of even the European Locust but I was not able to identify this one easily – any entomologists out there?

Locusts are an apt metaphor for the outsourcing companies that the UK Tory government see fit to issue with contracts for Covid 19 Test and Trace as part of their ideological drive to centralise power with the Cabinet, richly reward their donors and no doubt themselves at some point down the line. It is the latest version of neo-liberalism and driven on the ideological side by Dominic Cummings (principal advisor to Boris Johnson) who is determined to curb what he sees as the bloated power of the UK Civil Service. However, as the linked article shows, this outsourcing is highly inefficient and costly. to give one example, local authorities in the UK have highly skilled tracing teams for use in sensitive areas such as STD cases but the government ignored this resource at the outset of the pandemic when it could have made a great difference in holding back the tide – preferring to centralise power to itself, not to mention the profits inherent in outsourcing. The outsourcing teams were undertrained, the privacy issues minimised for centralised efficiency and due to general inefficiency, were underused (staff reported being paid to sit on standby for calls and not receiving any) and when they did get calls, their efficiency in tracing (64%)was much lower than that achieved by local authority teams in their fields (97%). Still the locusts swarm around the government who are secretive about the amount they are dishing out but may very well run into billions on track and trace alone…

Meanwhile, here on Crete where our personal escape plan seems to have succeeded, that is to say, we arrived by air without so far, displaying any sign of having Covid 19 (touch wood). Due to the UK government first saying it was impossible to issue travel/quarantine on return bans for anything less than a whole country, they then did one of their trademark U-turns and following a planeload of returning holidaymakers from just one Greek island, the government imposed a 14-day quarantine on all people coming from all Greek islands. This ignores the fact that it was those British holidaymakers who probably took the disease with them and shared it amongst themselves as well as the islanders. Consequently, many people cancelled their Greek holidays, unable to take unpaid holiday leave to quarantine on their return and their employers unwilling to grant it anyway. Our own direct flight to Crete was one of the casualties and we had to fly via Athens which was a rushed and harassing connection.

The effects on the Greek tourism industry have been catastrophic – especially on the islands which often depend on tourism and considering that the total covid record for the whole of Greece amounts to say – one day in the UK, this seems very unfair and it is quite ironic that one should be expected to quarantine passing from the comparative safety of Greece to the dangers of out-of-control Britain. Given that most Greeks do not know anyone who has contracted covid 19, even at several removes, the level of compliance in mask-wearing in shops and by those serving in restaurants, is all the more remarkable. I feel that in the long term, people will look back on this pandemic and see the apparently limited numbers of victims compared say, to Spanish Flu) as opposed to the long-term effects which we are just beginning to suspect the extent of and be amazed at the initial good response of people to something they could not see happening for themselves and the squandering of that good effort by some governments due to concerns for economic health. The Greek islanders – through no choice of their own (unlike say, New Zealand) – have been forced to take the economic hit but been saved, so far, the health hit – it remains to be seen whether they will feel blessed by that…

Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still in the process of settling in to what is clearly more than a holiday (at a projected three-month minimum) and yet not an outright move to live in another country. This is what exercises our minds presently…

P.S.

On the millipede front, I was wondering what other creature might benefit from the bonanza of the beast’s appearance since this seems to be axiomatic fodder from our watching of nature documentaries. Every morning there are many dead bodies on the steps down to our apartment and no sign of anything eating them – so imagine my surprise when I saw the not merely dead, but somewhat desiccated body of a millipede moving with apparently unnatural animation – a sideways movement impossible for a live millipede. The cause was an ant, a fraction of the millipede’s size who not only dragged the beast on the horizontal, but up a 7cm step. Unfortunately, I missed this feat by the time I got the video up on my phone but below is some of the heroic event on the flat – David Attenborough eat your heart out!


Four Months On…

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 I resurrected this blog shortly before the Covid 19 and just in time to participate in the A to Z 2020 Challenge which since I had only discovered on the first day and thus being totally unprepared for in terms of a subject, I wrote about what was going on at the time – Covid 19! 

After the rigour of posting once a day, I tailed off rapidly and I see now that it is just over four months since I last posted – enough with the confessional – Lewis Carroll, a prolific letter writer opined that one should never spend more than a page and a half apologising for not writing sooner…

So what now? Well, Covid 19 still dominates the headlines as well as the smaller column inches of the media and truly it has impacted all our lives. In my own case, my partner and I have just taken ourselves away from the UK and off to Crete to sit out the shit storm which continues to be the UK government’s handling of the pandemic. I realize that sentence needs many qualifications but more of that later.

My partner’s sister lives in Crete with her Greek partner and suggested we might be both safer and happier wintering with them since the effect of isolation on mental well-being is, for many of us lucky enough not to catch the virus, by far the worst aspect of the crisis. Those of us who are in later life especially so since the virus is mainly milder for younger people so we must be more careful than they, more isolated. We had, of course, to brave the perils of flying, weighing up the risk of catching against the risk of escaping the virus. Since the entire covid 19 record of Greece amounts to about one day of the UK history – it was not too hard a choice.

So here we are on our second day, a fierce sun has just shot up, as it does here and we are planning to stay for at least three months since the next looming crisis is the end of the Brexit Transition Period on 31st December 2020. Will it force us to return or can we afford to stay longer? Time will tell…

So I don’t wish to make this new trenche of posts to be all about the virus because we have all had enough of that – even if we can’t help looking at the news, the science articles and the noise and nonsense of social media. So I will leave you today with a picture of a different plague – not of locusts but of millipedes. We travelled on Friday just gone, to the news that Crete was suffering an unseasonal downpour of rain and this was the signal for these little critters to emerge from whatever damp place they call home, and climb the walls – literally. Whether climbing the walls is an understandable response to being locked down underground during the long hot summer or some other compulsion such as breeding – I cannot say! they were, however, everywhere – not just outside, but clinging to ceilings and walls inside having squeezed under locked doors – it’s life Jim – but not as we know it…

Oh – and if you do pick them up – they squirt a lingering smell of creosote in their defence… Perhaps somebody can give us their true name, and why they climb the walls?

O is for Oxford

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Oxford – The Bridge of Sighs


Oxford is my city of birth and this photograph is from my last visit in 2017 to meet up with school friends. Due to the wonders of the internet, we have been connected by a Yahoo group for over twenty-five years. We used to meet up in Oxford and play the current boys at cricket, but now the youngest of us is 65, that doesn’t quite work! We should have been meeting up again this month but Covid 19 has put paid to that. So this photograph is a reminder of the last time but also of growing up in the iconic city. There is something special about growing up in a place that so many people visit, recognize, attend university at – it is yours but it is everybody’s…
Although this is called the Bridge of Sighs due to a resemblance to the bridge of that name in Venice, it actually bears a closer resemblance to the Rialto Bridge – also in Venice. It is part of Hertford College.

The Power of Facebook

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This post was too long for my Facebook status so I am posting it here…

This time last week I was slipping into a hot tub at the swimming pool in Iceland with Groa and Ingo and also we met up with Britta and Mel.
If this week has shown me anything it is the power of Facebook. Not only has the spirit of last weekend continued to bubble like a geysir – erupting regularly with photos, videos, sounds and most of all, comments, but the power has been revealed in other ways. My friend Laura McManus who sings in Leeds City Harmony with me, was devastated as the tragic shootings in Whitehaven unfolded for her via Facebook posts from friends who still live there. She was able to ring her Mum and make sure she was alright – in fact she was locked in a shop which the gunman walked past.
Other friends have been sharing news and comment about the Gaza atrocity – yet another disaster for Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians. In Bob Dylan’s words “When will they ever learn?”
So Here we live in a world of cities so big they produce alienated individuals who can go on a shooting spree and at the same time, Facebook connects people instantly across the world in a new kind of super-community.
It’s thought provoking…
So here in a special dual language post courtesy of Google Translate is the post in Icelandic – sort of…


Í þetta sinn í síðustu viku var ég renni inn í a heitur pottur við sundlaug landsins, með Groa og Ingo og einnig hittum við upp með Britta og Mel.Ef þessi vika hefur sýnt mér neitt það er kraftur af Facebook. Ekki aðeins hefur anda síðustu helgi hélt áfram að kúla eins og Geysir – erupting reglulega með myndir, myndbönd, hljóð og umfram allt, ummæli, en vald hefur fundist í öðrum hætti. vinur Laura McManus minn sem syngur í Leeds City sátt við mig, var rúst sem hörmulega shootings í Whitehaven ósamanbrotnum fyrir hana í gegnum Facebook innlegg frá vini sem búa enn þar. Hún var fær til hringur Mamma hennar og tryggja að hún var allt í lagi – í raun var hún læst í búð sem gunman gekk yfir.Aðrir vinir hafa verið að deila fréttum og athugasemd um Gaza hörmungar – enn eitt stórslys fyrir tengsl Ísraels við Palestínumenn. Í orðum Bob Dylans’s “Þegar þeir vilja læra alltaf?Svo hér við lifum í heimi borgum svo stór að þeir framleiða alienated einstaklingar sem geta fara á tökur gleðskapur og á sama tíma, Facebook tengir fólk saman í stað um allan heim á ný tegund af frábær-samfélagsins.Það er talið vekja upp …