The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Katie
From the ashes of what fire did the family name of Phoenix flutter forth, what history sired it and does your clan live up to its name re-emerging from whatever disaster the times heap on your homes – challenge your lives with to be reborn and renewed tempered by the flames? These bonfires fed with prunings from the olive grove in Crete likewise strengthen the tree for a more fruitful future…
This photograph was my favourite of all the ones I took in Crete during lockdown in the Winter of 2020. Katie’s card (below) was all about Summer and making the most of it…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Peggy
To live by a great water is to have a special sense of place and you live in a place of Great Spirit by the Great Water. The moods and music of water change every moment and as well as the water the reflections of great clouds and huge skies dwarf our mortal constructions and remind us of the power of nature. We lived six months in lockdown with this stunning view of mountains and Mediterranean in Crete, winter of 2020 – I for one loved the cloud mountains…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Amy
This might seem like sending coals to Newcastle a picture of mighty mountains to a woman who lives on a fiord with her back to mountains of her own but these mountains have never known the touch of glaciation these mountains in Crete where we spent lockdown may be capped with Winter snow but from their tops you could see Africa if only you were young enough to climb and not locked down so every day we just admired from afar
Amy’s card was only my second to arrive from Group 15 which I belonged to – I was the only non-American on the list! Her card was glittery and featured a drunken fairy and the mossy rocks which I imagine abound in the Washington landscape… I only wish I could share her poem!
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Aliens Are these alien plants their blue-green colours against a permanently pink Mars-like sky? No, they are standard pallette for a contemporary Creatan landscape gardener planted against a bold and untraditional pink on the gable end of a lockdown vacant let between the beach and the capacious cave where villagers celebrate fiestas in normal times. Evading unlikely police we are the aliens here…
And below is the card that I received from Alison…
The idea of the poems is generally that they should be epistolary, relate to the image on the front of the card, and – if your card has been received already by the sender (not possible with the first few obviously) – then it might relate to your poem too. I am not allowed to show you Alison’s poem but I can say that she probably had received mine and she does reference “a new palette of colours”.
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…
If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…
Olive flowers and fruit, Crete, by the author.
With so many foods in our globalised world, we may never see them growing in their native habitat, but back in the winter of 2020, when my partner and I were lucky enough to lockdown in Crete for six months, I was able to take these pictures, firstly of the olives in fruit and then, following the harvest, the next year’s flowers – beautiful, tiny flowers. Cretan olives are small and although they can be eaten, they are mostly used for olive oil production and little factories all over the island grind into life for their short but frantic season of activity. Following the harvest, growers must prune their trees to keep them at a manageable height and shape for harvesting which is done by placing nets all over the ground below the trees and then using a sort of mechanical beater at the end of a large pole to knock the olives to the ground. So first the island sounds like it is being attacked by giant bees and then later it is shrouded in smoke from the many bonfires disposing of the prunings (see below). There is lot of waste heat generated here but the pits from the pressed olives are dried and do become fuel – the boiler of a laundry serving all the hotels in Elounda, where we were staying, was powered by olive pits!
Bonfires of olive prunings in an olive grove, Crete 2021
I realised that year, that what I had always heard, that olives have to be brined in order to remove the bitterness from them and make them palatable, is not the whole story. If you read my entry for K, where I discuss lactic acid pickling, you can see that the olives must be considered as being pickled and that the flavour changes are more complex than simply soaking the bitterness away. There is a variety and style of green olive that I used to get from a Cypriot shop in Brixton, London, where the brining is very light and the olives have been cracked to allow the brine to penetrate better – they then have some olive oil, lemon slices and coriander seeds added – they are definitely more bitter than most olives but they grew on me…
Olive Oil is credited with increasing the longevity of Mediterranean peoples, they use it instead of butter so for example, you sit down at a restaurant and you are immediately brought a small dish of olive oil and some bread to dip into the oil and eat. This will be extra virgin (first pressing) olive oil which has the greatest benefits as well as the best taste. Industry has been quick to jump on the benefit and produce margarine type spreads made from olive oil, but in the same way that the benefits of olive oil are destroyed by heat (so it is no good frying with it if you want it’s health benefits), I very much doubt that the many processes necessary to create spread, preserve the benefits either – take the wholefood (minimal processing) approach and stick to dipping your bread or pouring neat over a salad.
Olives can obviously be eaten on their own but are added to salads and stews but as an ingredient, a classic dish is Tapenade, and once more, Elizabeth David is the person responsible for introducing this to the British in 1950, and once they were able to get the ingredients, following the end of rationing, it provided an easy to achieve but sophisticated dish. The name comes from tapeno, the Provencal word for Capers and although it features olives as an ingredient, this is principally a caper dish. This recipe was adapted from “Mediterranean Cooking,” by Paula Wolfert (HarperPerennial, 1994) and appears here, and Wolfert in turn, based it on Elizabeth David’s recipe…
TAPENADE – Pit a cup of wrinkled black olives (ready pitted olives do not have the same amount of taste and it’s easy enough to be worth doing yourself) – 4 tablespoons capers – 2 tablespoons lemon juice – 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard – Freshly ground black pepper – tablespoons cognac or dark rum – 1 cup olive oil 1. Soak the olives, anchovies and capers to remove excess salt. Rinse and pat dry. 2. Chop as finely as you can (do not be tempted to use a blender) olives, anchovies, capers. Place in a mixer and add the lemon juice, mustard, pepper to taste and cognac. Mix until pasty. 3. With the motor running, drizzle in the olive oil in a steady stream to obtain a smooth, thick sauce. Transfer to a bowl; let stand for at least an hour before serving to allow flavours to mingle.
Variations: To mellow the bold, salty flavor of this tapenade, mix in about a tablespoon of tomato paste and a pinch of sugar, or a tablespoon or two of crumbled canned tuna. Or bake a whole eggplant at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, until it is black, blistery and collapsing. Peel under running water, and squeeze out any bitter juices. Place in a bowl, preferably wooden, and pound until well-mashed. Then gradually whisk in the entire cup of tapenade.
Per (1-tablespoon) serving: 53 calories; 5g fat (85 percent calories from fat); 0.5g saturated fat; 3mg cholesterol; 1g protein; 1g carbohydrate; no sugar; no fiber; 245mg sodium; 9mg calcium; 23mg potassium.
And so to overeating… The “miracle” of first world agri-industry, with it’s chemicals to fertilise, protect from pests and disease, and even genetic engineering, implemented on an industrial scale by machines so large, that many small farmers no longer do the work, but bring in contractors to plough, spray and harvest crops, has made food production more productive and so more profitable – but at what cost? The food may be cheaper, but damage to the environment and bio-diversity and to the quality of the food, raises questions of whether it was worth it – and that’s just the crops. I have already described the cost in terms of land use, of raising meat and to that you can add issues of quality, in the light of the use of anti-biotics and growth hormones being passed up the food chain – to us! But it’s the cheapness that leads to the problem of overeating. In America, where agri-business reigns supreme, visitors to that country are staggered – literally – at the portion sizes in restaurants and equally, by the number of obese people – most Americans are not the svelte people we see in Hollywood offerings…. And the rest of us first worlders are not far behind. The combination of fat and sugar is particularly bad for people on low incomes. Take this trick of the food industry, sugar, salt and acidity, are all flavour enhancers which means that if you are making a tin of baked beans say, you can get away with a tiny amount of tomato in the sauce (saving money), as long as you use a well balanced mix of the flavour enhancers mentioned above. Too much salt is bad for your blood pressure but sugar is the killer, too often hidden in products such as baked beans and in staggering amounts in fizzy drinks, unless they are sugar free – in which case they are replaced, often, with addictive, probably harmful in the long run – Aspatrtame. For years, the sugar industry put the blame for obesity on fat, but we need “good” fats and we certainly don’t need lots of sugar.
Of course, exercise is good in combination with reducing your portion sizes just as much as fat and sugar combined are the very devil! At the end of the day though, reducing portion size and watching the calories (especially from sugar), are the most important steps, the more the weight comes off, the easier it becomes to exercise and then you have a positive feedback loop…
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?
