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 23 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… Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…
Dear Albert I wish to report a crime! On a recent visit to Blackheath, London, I came across this Jane Doe – provisionally identified as Barbie. The naked body dumped on a wall evidence of torture with a cigarette lighter to the breasts – otherwise no obvious sign of fatal injury no witnesses, no motive. Who would abandon such a doll? Who can fathom the workings of the human heart…
In Washington State great trees abound but Olive trees are not, I think there found these are the flowers of the Cretan Olive grown more for oil than eating olives now are threatened by global warming. Pray for the farmer’s harvest when next year comes around I am guessing from your name that your family is no stranger to olives…
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…
Greenlit or giving something the green light, barely scrapes into this theme since you would think that it’s not so hard to figure out – after all the traffic-lighting system has spread even further than the road traffic indicators with which we are all only too familiar. The reason it has made it into the blog is that it is not road, but railway signals that originated the coloured signalling.
Today greenlit has a special resonance with the movie industry since movies have so many hurdles to jump before they are greenlit to go ahead but green-lighting is used for all sorts of projects in many industries.
The coloured lights, at least the red and green, moved over to road traffic lights fairly smoothly, although it took a while for universal agreement on the Amber warning phase. (See here)
Get Someone’s Goat…
Unlike greenlit, the origins of this phrase are not at all obvious! One might imagine from the current usage – To Make Someone Angry- that this refers to the natural consequence of the theft of a goat however the true origin is more bizarre – although it still involves the theft of hapless goats. Goats are said to have a calming effect on horses and race horses are notoriously high-strung, so owners might put a companionable goat in the stall of a racehorse on the night before a race. Naturally, if a rival stole the goat and the horse was consequentially over-frisky, the owner would be very angry…
These are Greek not Spanish olives, taken by myself in 2020
Get There with the Olives…
Sometimes, olives are served at the end of a Spanish meal and so someone who “get’s there with the olives” is arriving very late!
Lastly – the links to Cant “G” languages courtesy of Wikipedia…
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…
