Man cold

The only thing worse than having a cold is having a husband with a cold. No words I write can explain it as well as the following clip.

Housework rules OK!

Driving back across the river yesterday. my daughter, whose ears are as big as any three-year-old’s, asks me, “There’s no work here for you, Mama?”

“No sweetheart, I can work in Scotland but I can’t work here, in Little Rock.”

“Yes you can work here,” she says. “You can do the housework.”

White sugar or brown?

A colleague of E’s arrived from Zambia and has nothing to do all weekend. “Tell her she can come over this morning if she wants and I’ll make some scones. But warn her that there’ll be a pack of three-year-olds here.” Proper scones have been on my mind since the biscuit biscuit fiasco, and I want a good excuse to try and make some. After all, shouldn’t every good wifey be able to produce a batch of fluffy warm scones at the slightest whiff of corporate entertainment?

P, arrives, actually thrilled not to be staring at the brown walls of her hotel for an entire day (I imagine them all to be brown but even if they aren’t, staring at them for 18 hours is going to discolour even the prettiest of magnolias). Fortunately for all of us, she has three young children and is not in the slightest put out by the covy that screams past her in various stages of undress as she forces her way into the house.

The scones turn out well, the only slight flaw being, perhaps, that in the absence of a circular cutter they all have to take the form of ducks. And it was only slightly perturbing for P to peer over my shoulder and pronounce, “Oh, is that how you make your scones?” I hadn’t thought that scones would be part of the Zambian cuisine, which only goes to show that you should never make assumptions about other people’s cultures; especially when the British colonial past is involved.

“Is this white sugar or brown?” asks P as she spoons it into her tea. I am confounded as it’s organic so it is a rather delicate shade of beige. “It’s white,” I say. “But I have to pay extra for it not to be completely white.” P looks askance, “But in Zambia it is the white sugar that costs so much and is so highly prized. We normally have to use the dark brown one.”

The conversation turns to food. P notices how all the food in Arkansas is fried,  and we try to explain about the cost and difficulty of getting organic, unprocessed, locally grown food, which is the only thing available to P, of course, grown on her farm or neighbour’s garden. “When people want something really special, then they go out for burger.”

The paradox of development is great. Americans are fat and want to be thinner and spend a huge amount of money on trying to be so, but in Zambia, “we are lucky when we have any oil to fry something and everyone wants to be fatter as it is a sign you have enough to eat.”

“And the tea. People here like to drink their tea warm, never hot.” I smile as I hear the same words that ran through my own mind two years earlier. “The problem is with the kettle, or absence of it,” I explain. “They heat water in the microwave here…” P shakes her head and laughs at the absurdity of the idea, “But that will never work, the tea has to brew.”

So what could have been a long grey morning as the snow pelts outside passes with a deep cultural exchange as we muse over fatness and fried doughnuts, food shortages and frugality.

Winter

Little Rock freezes. E and I pour scorn on Friday when the forecast of one tenth of an inch of snow closed all schools and offices for the day. How pathetic is that? But the snow came, and fell not as those big fluffy flakes from fairy tales and Finland, but as hard rounds pellets, which simultaneously melted and froze. In a couple of hours the city turned into a giant luge, covered from the highest aerial to the lowest gutter in a uniform sheet of ice.

R and her friend slide down the hill in a cardboard box. They slide until there is no more box: only tape and mush. Our neighbour gets on his snow mobile for the one day of the year when there is a tenth of an inch of snow. And spins around in the road aimlessly.

Angel dog and Psychotic Dog are initially appalled but later ecstatic. Leaping in circles, hauling me to the park, noses alternatively pegged to the ground and reaching for the cold night air.

But today there has been a steady drip drip drip.

And now it is all gone.

Time to go?

Perhaps the final dawning came last week when the highlight of the day was the washing and drying of every single item of laundry in the house. Truly, it was very satisfying, and may in itself be a unique, once-in-a-lifetime event; but life needs to contain more challenges than that now. And so it shall. E and I have made a decision to move to Mozambique.

This is a big decision. Bigger than deciding to get married, deciding to move to Kenya, deciding to get a dog, deciding to get another dog. It’s that big. It’s so big that even though now we’ve decided we’re going, now that E’s company have almost conceptualised that sending someone to Africa is not the same as sending them to Disney Land, it still doesn’t seem real.

And indeed it should not. Not until a contract, the contract, which has been under discussion one way or the other for the past seven months, is signed, will I actually be ready to think we might leave.

The end of the Christmas holidays is never the highlight of the year, but arriving back this year brought the realisation that there is no future here for me. Very good friends, yes; very good tea, yes. But with a work permit still five of six years away, friends and tea are not sustaining enough. There has to be something else.

And so there will be. A new continent, a new language, a new car, a new washing machine (you see, there I go again on my laundry obsession), a new driving licence, a new set of rules and regulations to be mastered and evaded, even a new bedside light.

Maybe. Nothing is sure until the contract has been signed.

The way it is

I glow as I return from my three-year-old’s room. She should have been asleep and when I went in to check on the murmurs, she said to me, “I love you Mummy and I know you love me too.” And then, “See you later Mummy.” And that was all.

It was the moment of clarification, the moment when I realised the purpose of enduring the last three months of hearing ‘No’ to absolutely every utterance I ever made. Not just  ‘No’ in fact, but ‘No’ with spontaneous disappearance; or ‘No’ and the onset of rigour mortis as we try to approach the toothbrush; or ‘No’ with a ragdoll effect at the sight of the car seat and some suggestion of could-we-hurry-up-please-or-Mummy-might-actually-die-of-hypothermia.

But I will put up with ‘No’ a hundred thousand times over for every, “I love you Mummy.” That’s just the way it is.

More on food

The Christmas present I gave E has heralded a wondrous change to the house. In a quest to drop a couple of kilos, E, has been cutting wheat out of his diet, which in terms of effort seems to be akin to asking a Parisian not to smoke. Still, with a few notable exceptions ( I am still not convinced that the $25 bread tin purchased last week was for the sole purpose of making sandwiches for the three-year-old), all credit is due.

My effort in support has been double pronged: a) showing solidarity through wheat abstinence (although bearing in mind the contents of the previous blog, I admit that this has not been entirely without hiccups; the fortunate thing being though, that I can usually get my carbo fix in between 4 and 5pm and have time to sweep up the crumbs into the bargain); and b) scanning our recipe books for suitable dishes to procure for supper every night. There are only so many omelettes you can offer in a week with the expectation that the relationship is going to continue to be a successful one, and I soon realised that it was time to expand the base of my gourmandization from Italy, where it has been lounging in refined white flour and full-fat cheese for a very long time, to somewhere slightly leaner.

Asia, where a sprinkling of peanuts and some delicately placed strips of steamed cabbage seem to comprise a meal, appeared the obvious choice. The local book store, aka mega chain, apparently stocked one book for every Asian country but twenty minutes of browsing prawns and soy narrowed the pick to Indonesia or Thailand, and Thailand eventually won on the grounds of being less fishy.

I presented E with this radiant book brimming with curls of spring onion atop nests of noodles and coriander, all beckoning to be sucked up and swallowed down in one fell gulp, and then waited. And the miracle happened. E fell upon it in awe, and has spent most of the subsequent days alternately pacing the aisles of the local oriental shop, complaining about the illegibility of everything stocked in the local oriental shop, and rustling up the next delectable dinner.

It is by far the most successful present I have ever given and I am already planning to which part of the gourmet globe we will travel next Christmas.

When a biscuit is not a biscuit

Christmas over, I have been suffering from symptoms of refined-carbohydrate-withdrawal for some time and today decided it was time to do something about it. One of the advantages of having a three-year-old is that you can go into overdrive in the production of baked goods all in the name of bonding and education. Really, there is no limit to the didactic benefits a small child can accrue from a session with a bit of flour and butter (sensorial – what does that dough feel like? Is it squidgy? Careful, the tray is hot; numerical – surely we’ve cut out enough sheep for a whole flock now; linguistic – the chick is bigger than the bull; behavioural – the mummy duck is with the daddy duck (on the baking tray) and she’s not pecking him; and so on. Really, if you try, you can pretty much incorporate anything you want to. So, armed with a bambino and bag full of cookie cutters I march into the kitchen with the goal of providing myself with a good few days of confection but carefully wrapped in the guise of, I’m only doing this because my child needs to and really I’d rather be doing her favourite puzzle for the 59^th time today.

Unfortunately, my mother’s twenty-year-old, tried and tasted Women’s Institute booklet of simply biscuit recipes is just that, my mother’s, and having no close substitute, I am forced to turn to the internet. Googling ‘WI chocolate biscuit recipe’ draws a pathetic blank, as do several similar UK-limited searches (Hello Ladies of Jam and Goodness, isn’t time you got on line?), and eventually, with a desperate toddler on my arm, I type “biscuit recipes” and come up with the perfect solution. Four simply ingredients, all mixed together, into the oven, ten minutes, and they’re done.

So we sieve and shake and measure and mix and then look at the sludgy slab in front of us and think that it doesn’t look much like biscuit material. A taste confirms that somewhere we have gone astray and either the recipe or we have missed out the sugar (at least) and possibly a number of other ingredients key to comestibility. I return to the laptop, which is skulking precariously close to the table edge in an effort to avoid lethal contact with flour and butter and all things sticky. Nope, there is no mention of sugar, how odd, but the heart-shaped cookies in the photo look like…oh no, oh bugger bugger bugger and more words of a similar but stronger ilk.  I read the  photo caption closely, “This is a basic biscuit recipe with baking powder used as the leavening. They’re easy to make and go with almost any meal.” Well yes, biscuits certainly have their place at the table, but it would be a hard sell to say they are an all round accompaniment. And the ones in the photograph, on close inspection, look suspiciously thick and pale. I realise my mistake: in my final haste to find a recipe I failed to set geographical boundaries to my search and I have just followed a recipe for biscuits, that good old southern comfort food, which is closely related to the scone but is, how shall I put it? somewhat less light and fluffy, (like Oprah to a prima ballerina perhaps?) and seems to be eaten mostly with grits and gravy; and not biscuits, those ambrosial, crunchy, buttery delights which go down rather nicely with a cup of tea and a spot of milk thank you very much. I take a pregnant pause whilst I chew over the colossal blunder I have just made. My three-year-old waits expectantly, elbow deep in dough. “A change of plan darling,” I breeze, “let’s whip out the clotted cream and pretend we’re in Devon this afternoon.”

A note on winter

Three weeks in Scotland and we are acclimatising. Night falls six hours earlier than it did in the summer, and sunrise comes five hours later. Sunsets may streak magnificent orange lines through thickening grey cloud, but the sun sinks below the horizon at three thirty and doesn’t begin to thrust grey shadows into the pitch night until after eight in the morning.  It is the price to pay for the long dreamy days of summer.

The wind has changed direction and now blows in from the North East, directly from Siberia in fact, with nothing but the Baltic Sea to impede its course. Hail and snow hurtle against the back door and the wind slices through me like a sword through feather, making me gasp with shock. But the house walls are a far cry from those in my American home – at least a foot of solid grey stone – and indoors, behind shuttered windows, it is easy to forget the storm raging outside. Only the occasional crack of ice on glass gives any clue away.

After the two days of driving from the Russian steppe, the wind swings round to the north and brings with it giant Arctic flakes of feathery snow. Overnight the country is transformed into a fairy kingdom, where sparkling white fields are broken only by black snakes of stone walls, scattered farm houses and copses of huddled trees. Unusually for Scotland, it is all still with us ten days later.

Between meals, E and I manage to squeeze in a couple of walks to the local castle and lake. Situated a stone’s throw from the town centre, but entirely secluded in park and woodland, the same family have been living in the castle since 1696, the oldest part of which was built in the 14th century. The castle sits graciously at the end of a large bullrush-lined Victorian lake surrounded by mixed beech woodland, and patrolled by a gaggle of ducks and an occasional osprey. On this day, the dozen or so castle turrets reign over a frozen lake and lead grey sky.

A deep covering snow has recently fallen and the elegant conifers have swung their branches lower to accommodate their extra freezing burden. Silence covers everything, not a whisper of wind nor the call of a single bird breaks the spell. The waterfowl have made themselves a small patch of open water at the front of the lake. As we approach, we see the swan family – two parents, and two offspring who still show mottles of brown feathers – stepping resignedly in a neat line, one behind another, towards the pool of water. Almost invisible against the snow-covered ice, they make a long pause before taking the last step which plunges them through the ice and into the frigid water. The male in front acts as an ice breaker to clear a channel through the frozen edges to the clear water beyond. His family follow close behind. A group of ducks stand, heads tucked under wings, on the frozen water, unmoved when we pass in the near darkness two hours later, presumably unmoving until the sun rises sixteen hours later.

E and I make snowballs, and hurl them at the nearest biggest tree trunk. Mine consistently sail past to the right, but with the making of each new snowball I take a step forward and finally, almost underneath the tree, I perfect my aim. In the meadow glade, on the other side of wood, we try again to gather up snow for a giant snowball and find that this time, as in the garden a few days earlier, the snow won’t pack together. I am reminded that the Inuits are supposed to have many words to describe different types of snow and wonder at the marvel of it all. (But now, disappointingly, having just looked this up, I find that it is not strictly true, nor  indeed even roughly true, it is not the type of the snow but the way the Inuit languages work that makes the many words – i.e. sentences in English can be compounded to one word in Inuit languages so that snow-that-makes-snowballs, or the-snow-that-sits-on-that-dogs-head, or the-snow-that-is-right-now-falling-through-the-trees, each become a different word.) So, in fact, there is an infinite possibility of snow words if you are speak Inuit. I wish I did.

By the time we make it out of the woods, the moon has risen, a hazy yellow ball encircled by a soft peach corona. The parkland is bathed in pale blue and grey, and darker moon shadows lie still under the clumped oaks. We stop to gaze at the miraculous beauty that surrounds us, but are driven forward by the sudden wind that starts to rise and bite around our fingers and necks. I pull my scarf tighter, and plunge my hands deeper into my down jacket, but to little effect. By the time we get home I am urging E to run the last stretch, simply to regain some semblance of warmth in my bones. But however cold the chill, it does not take away the memory of the beauty of the night, the stillness of the woods, and the peace of our world.

Christmas day

Nothing will ever surpass seeing my three-year-old’s face light up with joy at the realisation that Santa had visited, drunk his milk, let his reindeer nibble their carrots, and left an overflowing stocking.

No moment will ever be better than seeing that unadulterated  happiness sweep across her face.

It was the beginning of a perfect Christmas.