I’ve taken a lot of ribbing from Ma this year and it’s time to confess, I like country music. Well some of it.
It’s not just Americana..some of it is country.
I listen to Bob Harris on Radio 2 nowadays. I’m done denying it. The music I like is the music I like and I’m not ashamed of it.
This is lovely, not because I have any attachment to Tennessee but because I understand the sense of place that it describes, because that’s how I feel about London..
It wasn’t the best weather but I’m glad we went..
Happy Friday, this is the first week since 22 July that I’ve worked a five day week and you wouldn’t have thought that it would be hard but I’m tired, ok, so it’s also the week when I’ve been covering for another person on top of my work but really, it shouldn’t have been so difficult, I blame 40!
Anyway the weekend is here, it’s a Bank Holiday in England and Wales (sorry Scotland!), so a three day weekend lies before me and I’m going to spend one of them in Broadstairs.
Here’s this week’s reading..
1) How home ownership became a nightmare. I know that I bang on about housing a lot, that’s because I think it’s important, nearly 60% of my salary after tax goes on rent, I have no security of tenure but I do have a good landlord and a job so I’m one of the lucky ones. However, I have no hope of every owning my own home, no access to public housing and I don’t earn enough nor am I able to save enough for a deposit to get me into a shared ownership scheme. Housing in this country is very broken and it’s going to take vision to fix it and none of the major political parties has a vision that isn’t more of the same.
Housing is the only basic human need for which rapid price rises are met with celebration rather than protest. The house trap stretches from the estate agents mediating house-selling, to the provision of mortgages to buyers, the supply of mortgage finance to the banks and building societies, the construction of house-price indices, the skewing of finance away from owner-occupiers towards landlords, the supply and construction. Homes were always castles, not just in England, but also across Europe and the US. But during the madness they evolved into cash machines, surrogate pensions, principal pensions, and even livelihoods. And in many places, this is still the case
2) Stumbled across this the other day and I completely get it, it’s not that I don’t know that I’m lucky and I am aware that other people are in a far worse place. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m secure and that feeling is tiring.
Holding things together is tiring. Knowing that you’ll be absolutely fine- as long as nothing goes wrong- is tiring. Not having much time or money? Is exhausting, because living on a tight budget takes work. Living on a tighter budget than you need to- both with time and money- because you know that you need that little extra wiggle-room when things inevitably go wrong? Even more so. And when more than one or two small things go wrong and you see your weeks or months of wiggle-room knocked back in hours or days? That’s exhausting.
3) Interesting. A convert from Christianity to Islam explains why he converted. I don’t agree with him, I don’t think that Christianity is passive and I don’t think that turning the other cheek is passive either. Refusing to be violent is a different thing from being passive. However, I can see why an RC school and an urban upbringing can cause conflict, I never got good answers from RE teachers as a teenager either…
I converted to Islam after learning about the religion’s monotheistic foundation; there being only one God – Allah who does not share his divinity with anything. This made sense and was easy to comprehend. My conversion was further strengthened by learning that Islam recognised and revered the prophets mentioned in Judaism and Christianity. My new faith was, as its holy book the Qur’an declares, a natural and final progression of these earlier religions. Additionally, with my newfound faith, there existed religious guidelines that provided spiritual and behavioural codes of conduct. Role models such as Malcolm X only helped to reinforce the perception that Islam enabled the empowerment of one’s masculinity coupled with righteous and virtuous conduct as a strength, not a weakness.
4) The royal baby pictures show privilege trying, and failing, to look normal
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may pose as totally average people, they may even think they are totally average people, but if they don’t care about image, why the Hollywood teeth? In this picture everything is manicured, including the vast empty lawn. It’s not an image of ordinariness but of the new elite of David Cameron’s Britain who dress, relax and smile with an unostentatious confidence that’s actually born of huge financial security
Along with the quiet time I seem to be having recently, if you looked at this space recently, it’ll seem like I haven’t been doing much cooking. I do cook for myself everyday but I haven’t been cooking much new stuff, relying instead on cooking familiar things that I know will work and taste good.
I make a loaf of sourdough at least every other week. Because it’s been warmer, I eat more salad, vegetables and fruit and there is less cooking but Friday Night Pizza is alive and well although sometimes it’s just stuff on bread! I got back into menu planning after my birthday because that’s still the best way for me to eat well and budget.
The biggest change to my kitchen was the death of my microwave, after near 21 years of service, it burst into flames and had to be scrapped! At the moment, I don’t intend to replace it, I generally only used it for heating up and defrosting things so it’s not the drama that my magimix breaking would be, although I do have to be more aware of making sure that I take things out of the freezer well before I intend to eat them! I’m trying to be more aware of what’s in the freezer and planning at least two dinners a week from what’s in there, I really want to clear it out and defrost it soon too! I’ve also taken to preparing the veg I buy at the beginning of the week, it’s much easier on a weeknight to pull out a bag of already prepped vegetables and stir fry or steam them than it is to prep and then cook them. Anything that doesn’t get used by Friday night, goes into soup so nothing’s wasted either.
I’ve been growing basil and rosemary and mint this year too. It’s been nice to make use of the fresh herbs in cooking and I want to do a bit more of that too, I’m not sure that the basil will last through the winter but I think the rosemary will.
It’s alive..
Even when I don’t enjoy cooking or it’s hot, I think preparing your own food is a valuable thing to do, it keeps me eating mindfully and ensures that I’m aware of what’s in the fridge so I’m aware of what needs using up and encourages me to be creative about how I cook. In How to Eat, there’s a section on what to eat when you want to lose weight and the bit that always stuck with me was Lawson’s comment that it’s easier to eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch and vary it for dinner because then you don’t have to think to hard about it. I think it applies to more than just when you want to lose weight, my mother ate the same three or so work lunches every day for about 10 years (always involving peppers, tomatoes and oatcakes and varying the protein!) so I come by it honestly, but I’ve noticed that this works when I menu plan, partly because it costs less and partly because I don’t do well with too much choice first thing in the morning!
So there has been cooking and there has even been some new things, a ‘pesto’ made with roasted peppers, basil and garlic (which I’ve covered a salmon fillet with and baked, used as a dip for vegetables and added to pasta and roasted vegetables), grilled courgettes with lemon, feta and salad leaves, old favourites are the baked falafel which I’ve been having with chopped salad for lunch (they also freeze really well too, which means I can make loads and stash them for when I need them), I’m still eating my weight in poached eggs (mostly on a slice of sourdough for breakfast!).
The cake of the summer has been this one but I’ve been varying the fruit so whatever fruit has been around I’ve used (berries, rhubarb, apricots, even tinned peaches at one point), it’s always good, really easy to make and works both as small cakes and a large one, it also freezes really well, so if for instance you make a cake for your mother and she gets sick and isn’t around to eat any you can always freeze it for another time instead of throwing it away! My birthday cake this year was the always easy and popular carrot cake and there will be another cake before the end of the summer for Kathy’s birthday but I’m not sure what yet (not carrot or ginger is all I know at the moment!), although I was thinking about this a lot this week because I love the simplicity of it.
The thing I didn’t do this summer was make any jam or cherries, Ma has a lovely jar of brandied cherries, that were a retirement gift from the guys at the OXO Bar (yes I am very jealous!) so I may have to eat some of those when they are ready come November but I wish I’d sorted myself out and got that done.
There are new recipes to try too. I want to have a go at these paleo cookies of Jenny’s, this chicken enchilada soup which strikes me as the perfect thing to eat as the autumn approaches and this before the summer is over. There are about 100 other things too but as ever, my eyes are bigger than my belly and that’s quite a feat!
Things are a bit dead at the minute. Work is quiet, because it seems that everyone is on holiday or about to go on holiday or just back from holiday. My birthday is over it and I noticed last night that the nights are drawing in and people keep saying that they are looking forward to autumn, which I don’t approve of at all.
I’m doing much the same as usual, keeping the flat tidy, going to work, the usual things but none of it seems to be very exciting. On Friday, people kept asking what I was up to and I felt very dull indeed because I’m just doing what I do, which really doesn’t seem very exciting.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about that and asking myself why everything has to be exciting. Why does something have to be happening all the time for me to feel that my life is enough? That I’m not wasting time? Why do I have to be in constant motion to feel that I have meaning?
Of course when I ask myself those questions, I realise that I don’t. Exciting events are great but they aren’t everything I am and the fallow times are sometimes the most interesting. What I do when no-one is looking, how I fill the quiet times in my life, are more a reflection of who I am than how I behave during the big events. It’s easy to be happy and grateful and content with life, when the amazing things are happening, when you get taken out for drinks or dinner and your friends are buying you iPads. It’s taken me longer to understand the small, simple joy of being content with life when there are no fireworks to watch or champagne to drink.
At the beginning of the year I chose a word to describe what I wanted 2013 to be about for me. I chose build. It seems to me that the things I do when life is a bit dull, when I’m waiting for the exciting things to happen, is more about building than when the exciting stuff is happening. Because it’s when life is quiet, that the things I do, build the life I want.
So yes, there’s nothing earth shatteringly brilliant happening in my life at the moment, but things are happening. I’m getting back into healthy habits, remembering the simple pleasure of my own company, exercising some more, doing boring things in the house, spending time with my family and friends and baking a cakes for birthdays and so on. I’m not living the high life but that’s ok because it makes me happy to have an empty laundry basket, to feed people cake, to have a restful afternoon with a book.
So next time someone asks me what I’m up do, I’ll remember that “same old, same old” may not sound terribly exciting but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I should do it more often! Photos below are from a walk around Temple on my birthday and from Marble Hill House last week.
My weekend started on Friday, with time off for the celebration of Tina’s life. It was a happy and a sad time, Charles, Christina, Tom, Jim and everyone else who spoke about T and sang did brilliantly and Tina would have loved it! As ever with funerals, it was also a chance to see people I haven’t seen in ages and again a very Tina thing. I’ll miss her and so will everyone else that was at the church on Friday.
On Saturday morning, I sat down in my favourite reading spot with a coffee. About 4 hours and a book later, I decided I’d better do some shopping.
That done, I launched into preparing myself for next week. Washing, cooking, housework etc and the joys of reading and finishing the Saturday paper on the day it’s published. A good day with the right balance of rest and work.
On Sunday, I went to Kingston to see a movie with Ma and now it’s Monday again.
Weekends go so fast!
On Friday I went to Tina’s not funeral, a the celebration of her life.
This was one of the songs that played out, Christina said that she remembers Paul Simon’s Graceland album playing a lot on the journeys in the car to and from visits to her grandparents is Cornwall and Scotland. She said that she liked to think that it reminded T of her childhood in Africa.
Graceland was released the year after Christina was born and I was 13, I don’t remember Tina playing this album in my presence but I remember it because Ma played it quite a bit in the car when I was a teenager.
The chorus couldn’t ring more true if it was written for her:
This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein
After the dream of falling and calling your name out
These are the roots of rhythm
And the roots of rhythm remain
1) Marina Hyde on David Cameron and Jesus.
“What would your response to Jesus be,” this person asked Cameron, “on his instruction to us to sell all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor?”
Well. I imagine this member of the public will soon be extraordinarily rendered to some Lynton Crosby-managed black site. Still, what a way to go.
As for Cameron’s response, I don’t need to tell you he declined to reply: “Jesus was a troublesome fundamentalist who barely appeared to have a job and appears to have naively placed pandering to the benefits class above economic growth on his list of priorities. I’d have told him to do one.”
2) Giles Fraser on unhappiness and medication.
…unhappiness is often a perfectly proper response to the state of the world. If you have a shit job or a shit home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. At best, many of the drugs we are popping only deal with the symptoms of all this, not the causes. At worst, they pathologise deviations for normalcy, thus helping to police the established values of consumer capitalism, and reinforcing the very unhappiness that they purport to cure.
3) French cheese, how it is made. I’m an equal opportunity cheese lover but I love comté. I blame Christelle for this, she’s from Franche-Comté and it’s the ‘local’ cheese. I especially love it in Christelle’s Dad’s french onion soup!
But although there has been a rise in artisan production and quality products in the UK, Britons are still apparently in love with cheeses of alpine origin. “Alpine cheese is definitely a strong trend, with comté, reblochon and beaufort all selling well,” says Wallace. “Our customers love the stories behind each cheese, and more unusual variations of milk and traditional methods of production are certainly becoming more fashionable.”
4) I’ve been thinking about Church a bit recently and how much I miss it, then I remember why I don’t go to Mass any more.
Somehow we have lost our way, forgotten the teachings of Jesus, and evolved into a very powerful and privileged clerical culture. It saddens me that so many of my fellow priests see women as a threat to their power. As men, we claim that we, and we alone, can interpret the Holy Scriptures and know the will of God. We profess that men and women are created in the image and likeness of God, but as men we have created God in our own image. And this God is very small, very male, and sees women as the lesser of men.
5)
It’s Wednesday, I’m halfway through the week, I’m also really tired and would like to understand why it takes 5 minutes to get out of a routine and about 5 weeks to get back into it.
I’ve got 6 weeks until the next holiday, yay for seeing John and Matt!
Of all housework tasks, I hate everything to do with floors, sweeping, cleaning, hoovering, most of all. Yes, I really need to clean my floors this weekend.
I’m really enjoying having an ipad even though I’ve only taken it out of the house once (when we went to Plymouth), it will come into it’s own when I’m in the States.
I now own a laptop, an ipad, a kindle and an iphone. On the way to work today, I read a book, a paper book. Everything changes and everything stays the same.
Today at work I’m meeting planning for 2014, the end of the year is only 4 and a half months away. I need 2013 to just slow the hell down…
I have, for the last three days resisted the office treat table and today’s cake sale. I’m aware of how much of my eating at work is habit and wanting distraction.
Tomorrow is my last work day this week which is nice but I’d actually rather be at work instead of at T’s funeral. My head is having trouble, with the concept of the world continuing as normal, without her in it.
