Pam's Tall Tales

In Sickness and in Health

For the last month my family have been on a roller coaster. In early March, aged parent was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and discharged the next day to convalesce at home. My siblings held the fort for a fortnight. I arrived three-weeks ago thinking I would be nursing a 93-year old man through an acute infection by cooking up hearty soups and tasty casseroles. Within a week his situation deteriorated rapidly, his ankles swelled and his chest began creaking like an old piano – symptoms of chronic heart failure. His GP was a saint and made three house visits, but by the weekend a man who 6 months before had been riding his bicycle could no longer lift himself from the chair. The hospital sent an ambulance and thanks to the oxygen supplement he’s now in happier spirits, but his doctors have a difficult task. For two weeks they have tried to  to relieve the excess fluid pressure on his heart without polishing off the kidneys in the process. If they can sail between this medical Scylla and Cherybdis to stabilize his situation, then he will be transferred to a rehabilitation ward to help him regain a measure of independent living. Faced with an uncertain prognosis we have scurried to plan for every possible outcome by interviewing home-care companies, vetting and visiting residential facilities, upgrading the house infrastructure to facilitate home-care. It has been a whirlwind eye-opening induction into the world of elder-care.

Amid this were some moments of respite to be cherished.   My sister sent a coffee press to help with my jet-lagged mornings and came up for two days to drive me to Macclesfield hospital via my beloved Bosley Cloud, Wildboarclough, Wincle and Higher Sutton – a route that sooths the spirit by its vaste wild beauty.

Bangers and Mash at The Robin Hood, Rainow with "Dearly Demented Sister" and "Soul of Patience" Brother-in -law

My distant cousin, Paul, with whom I share the family tree hobby, drove over from Warrington to give me his great grandmothers invitation to my parents wedding. My school friend Gill, with whom I have shared all the important ups and downs of life, came twice to provide her sage District Nurse advice, solace and friendship. In each case we dined at some lovely ancient Cheshire pub – the Bears Head at Brereton, The Swetty Arms at Swettenham, the Robin Hood at Rainow. Dads neighbors, Sylvia, Harry, Sue and John, and bicycling buddies, Paul and Hamish, called, visited, drove us to and fro, listened and provided important advice, support and freindship.

Roast Lamb at The Swetty Arms, Swettenham, Cheshire

Having to leave in the middle of all this is an unpleasant corollary of working abroad. Expats set out on our big career adventures to new lands as young people - a quarter of a century later we find ourselves distant from elderly relatives in need of our care and torn as to where to retire when our children and our grandchildren have grown up as citizens of other countries. The Seven-UP documentary, which traces the life path people of my age group, has highlighted this dilemma in the case of one participant, Nick, who grew up on a farm in Yorkshire Dales wanting to study the moon and be an astronaut, and as a legacy of Maggie Thatchers gutting of the British university system, left the UK to make his career as a physicist in Madison, WI. 

Bro, The Good Son, with Dad

This situation also crystallizes that my siblings friends and I are now on the downward slope of the Gaussian curve of life. In thinking this over I have decided that there are three essentials to maintaining a long quality of life  at home as one ages.  First, you need a good son, like Bro, who is always there in times of need.   Second, you need to rip out the bathtub and  install a wet room - on the ground floor - sooner rather than later, and third, and equally importantly, you need to live within walking (motorized wheelchair) distance of a Cheshire pub. Remarkably Brereton Hall gatehouse fulfills these two latter criteria and has just come on the market. I’m very tempted - and to my American husband - it’s as good as an English castle.

The Gatehouse to Brereton Hall

 

The pub next-door: The Bears Head, Brereton, Cheshire

How To Pour The Thanksgiving Gravy

Norman Rockwell Thannksgiving Dinner

This week the long suffering husband  went ahead and bought his "ancestral" Michigan lake house. I am trying to reserve judgement on the wisdom of having a house that is two days drive away, but, at present, the one positive thing I can say  is that I now have a closet in which to store all the detritus and family memorabilia one collects in life - make no mistake this is a big deal if you live in a one bedroom apt in New York.  

It's not clear however that I  need such a closet anymore.  In a most inauspicious start to this venture, while packing up the car - to drive up to Michigan's frozen tundra  to ensure the heating was on and the pipes won't freeze and burst - a gale-force wind suddenly whipped down our buildings driveway - sending the luggage cart, bearing all the goods and chattels I've carefully saved over the last 30 years  crashing  onto 37th street. 

The long suffering one appeared in the doorway contrite and bleeding from cuts to his hand from the broken crockery. To make amends he announced  that he would return to New York for the  Thanksgiving Holiday.

This is the major family holiday in the USA when everyone is supposed to gather around and eat turkey in good old Norman Rockwell style.  This year I decided to get into the spirit of it and dress up the table.  Unfortunately the straw turkey centerpeice I was after was immediately sold out so I got a pair of pinecone pheasants instead.

 

We have lacked a gravy boat for the last thirty years. This is because I'm from the industrial North of England where we like swimming pools of gravy on our mashed potatoes and so I've never really been able to find a gravy boat that was big enough.  But this year I googled "BIG gravy boat" and up came a number of amusing options.

The most substantial one that could probably accomodate my families level of gravy consumption was the "The Titanic".  

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Then up popped one that would appeal to my dear demented cat-loving sister, who keeps four smelly felines. 

Then  I found one, from SailorFineArt on Etsy, that fits this quintessential American holiday perfectly - The Mayflower Gravy Boat , complete with Pilgrim salt and peppper shakers!

Having solved the gravy problem I just needed to replace the turkey platter that was smashed to smithereens on 37th st.  China of all types is dear to my heart because I come from a region that is a stones throw from the Staffordshire Potteries.  Growing up we all got bronchitis every winter from the kiln smoke blowing over the Pennines and collecting in the hollow of the Cheshire Plain.  Many neighbors were skilled china hand painters and my first job, aged 13, was to help my mother paint Bosson's heads - classical slave home labor at 10p each.  My first choice for a turkey platter was this lovely hand painted peice of Royal Cauldon china.

 

But, beautiful as it was, the $400 price tag put paid to that idea.  Then I found  "Washington Crossing the Delaware" .  Although this event took place at Christmas rather than Thanksgiving it seems to fit the bill for a transatlantic family - depicting a scene that is dear to the American heart on a plate that was manufacutured in  Staffordshire ....

 

 

Home is where the heart is - but where is that?

 

    Sometimes, as the sun sets on the Hudson and a calm pink glow extends over the expanse of Manhattan spread out before my living room window, I look out over the city and think of Reverend Eli Jenkins in Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood" as he throws open his windows each morning, and in his lovely welsh lilt, issues a blessing on his adopted town.

By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,

But let me choose and oh! I should

Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray

In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,

And hear the Dewi sing all day,

And never, never leave the town.

Other times - when its a really good day - I think about  Walt Whitman's poem Miracles 

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there? 

    But there are other days....... when, despite  twenty years of practice that allow me to say with certainty that I could sleep in the middle of a six lane highway,  the honking of those friday night commuters - all too eager to flee down the The Midtown Tunnel to Long Island - becomes unbearable.  Days when the cold hearted canyons and towers of the Wall Street Downtown District glower on the skyline like ostentatious cemetery sepulchers in praise of mammon. Then I yearn for the incomparable greenness of Cheshire, for the blue expanse of the Cheshire plain, for the stonewalls crisscrossing the hills and the view of The Cloud - the last outcrop of the Pennine chain.

I come to these thoughts again because The Long-Suffering Husband has lately voiced a similar yearning - but for a different place.  A  cabin on a remote lake in the Upper Pennisua of Michigan, one that once belonged to his  parents, recently came up for sale. He expressed his desire to buy it, and, as I well understand this yearning, I foolishly said "Go ahead".  After our recent pleasant dalliances in breezy Newport and a pleasant balmy stay in the civility of Charleston I imagined we had finally put behind us all those sweaty holidays on mosquito ridden lakes. But now the bugs have literally come back to bite me. Of course there is no logic to this decision. We live two days drive or an eight hour flight away and so until we retire could spend less than three weeks a year there at most.   But all diaspora hanker for a precious toe-hold in their past and, in these matters, the heart must have its way. On the bright side there are wolves up there - five hundred and four of them in the last count - so perhaps, when it snows and the bugs have gone it too will be full of natures miracles.

Baking The Bread of Those Early Years

 

Bread Rolls - experiment 2

The stinging hail and sleet of the New England storm front started on Friday. Trapped inside by the raging blizzard, I decided it would be a good weekend for baking bread. It’s been half a century since I’ve tackled bread and back then my contribution was to mix the yeast and sugar into a sweet smelling paste. My mother’s bread rolls were famous around town both for their lovely soft texture and sheer number. She baked them for our picnics among the sheep in Macclesfield Forest and by the hundreds for shindigs at the Midlands Electricity Board (MEB) working men’s social club.  Baking for the latter was an army maneuver: the kitchen became the war room with Mum the General. The dough was pounded, stretched, sprinkled with flour and then,in some strange initiation rite, everyone in the family had to be chased around the kitchen and slapped with it. The kitchen smelt wonderful. The rolls were turned out in batches by the truckload and packed off to the club.  

 

Unfortunately the recipe went with Mum to the grave and so now I am experimenting to conjure it back up. I like it. It feels like the good old fashioned biochemistry, which I sorely miss now that I am no longer “beavering at the bench” but tied to my desk begging for vanishing funding. My first attempt with dried yeast was a disaster. So last week I ordered a 1lb cake of fresh yeast from a website deceptively listed as “New York Bakers” but which at check out turned out to be in San Diego.  I excitedly tracked the course of my yeast as it flew in via fed ex arriving under the radar just before the blizzard struck.  On Saturday afternoon, as the temperatures dropped, we rolled up our sleeves, turned on the bright red oven to get the kitchen toasty warm, and got cracking. This second attempt was not too bad – at least it rose and was edible, even passible, but in terms of my mother's gold standard we’re not there yet.  The baps were too solid and cake-like. Perhaps it was because I used a bag of yellow flour that said it was perfect for Pizza dough. Apparently bread likes gluten-rich flour made from wheat from Canada or the Russian Steppes - Italian strains wont do.  Perhaps it also needed some lard (another thing that’s hard to get in New York).  Still I’ve got 15 oz of yeast left to get it right, my kitchen smells like heaven and the neighbors are salivating at the door.  

Ghosts of Christmas Past

We got into the Christmas spirit early this year. That is, the long suffering husband stocked up the drinks cabinet and I bought a tree, right after thanksgiving, from the Canadians who set up little fragrant pine forests on every street corner of NYC. 

http://www.thelibraryshop.org/

 

Since then I find myself homesick for pantomime. This is odd because when we were children my family never took us. The closest we came to theatre was chilly Junior School Christmas parties at the neighboring Reform School for naughty boys and orphans. There the hall was big enough to seat us and we would watch a crackly old reel of Charlie Chaplin while eating mince pies and Walls ice cream while the naughty boys played around in the snow outside.  

This week I was also sick (a nasty norovirus) and while lying in bed watching the warm little lights twinkling on my tree out on the balcony I tried to fathom the source of this Panto nostalgia. Then it came to me.  One year a troop of traveling actors came to Congleton County Infant School and performed “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”.  I was four years old and enthralled. The excitement was matched only when, the following year, the circus came to town and we were allowed to line the street to see the elephants walk down from the station to set up the big tent. 

I took my own children to the theatre for the first time when they were preschool to see “The Gingerbread Man”.  It was superb. But  when the “Old Tea Bag Witch” leapt out of the Teapot and I shouted out with the others “he’s behind you” they were embarrassed. They begged me not to, but I couldn’t help it. Later when my daughter was fifteen we took her to a midnight New Years Eve performance of “Twelfth Night” in a tiny theatre in the East Village. Again she was humiliated to be with her parents when she could have been up to no good at CBGBs with her friends. But Robert Hooke, an aging actor with the Pearl Theatre Company, saved the evening by playing Malvolio so superbly that she had to laugh – he was about 80, but an actor to his core, he played his heart out and now she too has the theatre bug.

Last year, the closest we could get to Panto was “The Lion King” on Broadway. This year it was “War Horse - the play”. The puppetry was magnificent in both. I can’t wait for my grandson to be three so we can go together and shout out from the rafters to embarrass his mother. 

 

War Horse Handspring Puppets

 

Cookery in Congleton

On these trips home, for reasons that I can’t fathom, I have become “the fly-in cook”.  For the last five years I’ve crossed the Atlantic to feed the five thousand.  Cooking in Aged Parents kitchen is not easy.  First, as a loyal card-carrying employee of the Midlands Electricity Board, Aged Parent refused to have gas in the house.  This means his offspring must master the dastardly infrared electric cooker. Passive aggressive is the only word for it:  the menace refuses to heat, then when your back is turned it boils, burns and charcoals everything in sight.  Second, all my recipes are in New York where we function in Fahrenheit not Celsius, and then there’s the wretched convection adjustment to calculate in. Not to mention Aged Parents love affair with Delia, who in my humble opinion -- as a professional biochemist -- can’t cook to save her life. I cleave to the Elizabeth David school myself: all recipes can be greatly improved by ditching the herbs and throwing in a glass of wine. 

Over the years I’ve learnt to tame the cooker beast.  But the real spanner in the works is Aged Parent and his cantankerous ways.  Aged Parent has a burning desire to die with only one knife and fork left in the house. He has a great need to rid himself of all earthly goods.  Oxfam has benefitted greatly from this tic and the local birds are the fattest flock of starlings in East Cheshire.  I have been caught out enough times now -- missing some key ingredient like salt or flour or a rolling pin -- that before I leave New York for JFK I go online to Ocado and order everything, bar the kitchen sink, to be delivered before I land. Still, this doesn’t stop Aged Parent from taking advantage of the time difference to eat some item critical for culinary success, like the cheese plate that he took a fancy to last Xmas, or, more often, stashing it somewhere, never to be seen again, all the while claiming Ocado forgot to deliver it.   

Is Aged Parent grateful for all of this cooking – not a bit.  He moans about how much food he’ll be left with after the visit is over and how long it will take him and the starlings to eat their way through it. Worst of all, in his desire to be rid of all life’s shackles and accoutrement, he’s taken to throwing away any booze that’s left after we depart.  My siblings and I have tried to hide it away in unlikely places so that we can count on a nip in future visits. But Aged Parent must scour the house because it’s always gone. He found it under the stairs -- where he must have got down on his ancient hands and knees to drag it out -- and he found it in the shed.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that he drinks the lot himself to recover from our visits.  For a while, when he was learning how to order his groceries online, we shared the same password and, while checking that he knew what he was doing in this digital world, I found myself privy to his substantial weekly Jonnie Walker orders. He claimed they were “on offer” and that he only bought them by the crate-load because he had to get his order up to qualify for free delivery. Aged parent is quite the master fibber.

Anyway, we are never sure if he likes our rowdy get togethers or not. But we like it, so he doesn’t really get a say in the matter. When the Morris clan assembles we make a lot of noise, Aged Parent removes his hearing aids and hides in his bedroom, and we get in the kitchen and cook.  That is, I cook.   My brother-in-law, “The Soul of Patience”, claims to be my obedient slave in this enterprise, but, under the guise of Sous Chef, he abuses his position to gain access to the cooking sherry and consumes vast amounts of liquor while peeling the odd carrot. And as for DDS, who, by the way, is certified not only as incurably insane but also as a fully qualified chef, -- she languishes on the sofa waiting for the “CRISE de NERFS” to happen. The “CRISE de NERFS” is always caused by the fact that Aged Parent has disposed of, consumed, or left to rot, at least one vital ingredient. I am sure that he and DDS conspire to bring this about.  As soon as she arrives he pretends to be frail and complains how terrible it’s been to go shopping with the Chef.  She encourages this, pampers, pets and plays the “good daughter” to the ungrateful old goat, and then she waits, knowingly, on the sofa for the moment when the doors start banging and shouts of “where’s the damn flour” or “what did he do with the bloody vinegar” reach a certain volume. Then, in she breezes, like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and asks, “is everything is under control?” Of course she doesn’t lift a finger until you are reduced to begging.   And only then, when the roast for ten is burning, or the gravy is tar, or smoke is bellowing out the back door, does she roll up her sleeves and transform herself into the TOTAL TYRANT that she was born to be. Let me tell you, Pol Pot takes lessons from my sister.  Commands are issued: MUSTARD she cries.  We scuttle to obey. Then HERBS DE PROVENCE she’ll scream, or WOUCESTERSHIRE SAUCE.  The Soul of Patience, who by this point is usually so inebriated that he can hardly stand, is treated abominably:  MICROWAVE THIS, WARM THOSE PLATES, STIR THAT. Ours is not to question why -- no insubordination is tolerated in the ranks -- otherwise, and it has happened so we know, she’ll flounce out of the kitchen, and we’ll be back to trying to rustle up a substitute for eggs in an omelette.

This trip was no exception.  There I was, beating through the rain with the umbrella for the third time to the local supermarket, the one that catering to old fogies has never heard of an olive, trying to put together two three-course meals for ravenous flesh-eating siblings and a vegetarian-in-law. Aged Parent was being uncooperative and kept insisting that there was nothing wrong with thawing out a few of his “Wiltshire Farm” frozen dinners to feed the ravenous horde and what was all the fuss about. As Aged Parent eats like a bird he thinks we should all do the same and because he has no teeth that means we would be on gruel all week. 

I decided to start the night before Bro and DDS were to descend. The kitchen to myself, I set about to beat the stove into submission. I smote it with two soups and a Bolognese large enough that Aged Parent could freeze down enough bird-like portions to get him through to June, a Goulash for supper the next day and a Ratatouille for the vegetarian.  In the morning I slathered the bird in bacon and got it in the oven, baked two apple pies – one for those with teeth and another for those without, and while in pastry mode slapped together a quiche for good measure, then sat down and had a fortifying sherry. Big Bro arrived and was put to work hauling in the chairs from the garage and setting the table.  This he does well. But, when tasked with “decorating the soup”, a certain mental paralysis ensued that required he first break open the wine and give this foreign concept some thought. The Soul of Patience had deserted his post – his excuse for going AWOL this year was “staying home to feed the cats” when in truth he’d “had enough of driving the old bag around Romsey the weekend before”. Despite his absence, things were going smoothly.  That is until the point when DDS came through the door. Then, they got seriously out of hand. The apple pies were brown but the chicken wasn’t, the cooker had a midday power surge and incinerated the gravy.  DDS looked at my sweaty brow with a little smirk and waited. Not until I pointed out that her “divine intervention” was necessary to save us from Aged Parents 91 year-old packet of BISTO, did she spring into action.

And then she was off, like a racehorse at the starting post, screaming MUSTARD, HONEY, ESSENCE OF MUSHROOM, HERBS DE PROVENCE.  I slaved to keep up. Bro emerged from the dining room announcing “one for the chef”. As I reached for the glass the LITTLE MINX seeing her opportunity to dominate claimed this was now her due, swiped it from his hand and downed the lot. At this, my sister-in-law, "The Only Sane Member of our Family", sensing the need to intervene to prevent sororicide, found where Aged Parent had hidden the plates and took charge of the “dishing out”. At last we sat down to eat. Aged Parent, resuming the role of patriarch, gave a magnanimous "Toast to The Chef(s)", we all fought to claim credit for the gravy, Bro proclaimed his soup decoration to be the artistic post-modern masterpiece of the century, and a merry feast was had by all in Congleton once more!

 

Salford was Never this Shiny in Lowry’s Day

There is nothing as lovely as a long train ride in a jet-lagged dreamy state.  As we set off from St. Denys I drifted along enjoying the morning sunshine and the pleasant lilting voice of my fellow Scottish traveller. Someone once told me that the degree to which people reveal their thoughts is inversely proportional to the length of their train journey.  It is true, by the time she alighted in Wolverhampton I knew her entire life history. As we emerged into the lovely greenness of Staffordshire the train gained speed. Crossing the border to Cheshire, suddenly I caught a glint -- the white water tower -- there it was, perched like a Victorian ornament on top of a wedding cake -- Congleton! I strained to see but we were through in a rattle of rail. On we sped along the Pennines to Manchester.

I first visited Manchester as a teenager. In my memory it is slaked with industrial grime peppered with the excitement of an adventure into the big wide world.  I can honestly say I have never seen the sun shine on Manchester and this trip was no exception.  One personal reason for attending the meeting was to see if all that Manchester rain would wash away my homesickness. By day three brisk tea was required to face the grey mornings, by day four I was nearly cured.  But, Manchester is like Philadelphia, a dour industrial city with an imposing past, and when you come from there you always feel the need to defend it, to extol its burgher work ethic, tout its cosmopolitan King Cotton past, and…. when pressed by skeptics…. well…. at least its not Birmingham.  The meeting itself was a success -- held in the The Palace Hotel and with receptions in Manchester Town Hall and other grand Victorian buildings of industrial weightiness.  I saw a lot of central Manchester, largely because I am “geographically challenged” when it comes to maps and equally dazed by verbal directions.  Lost at every turn, I wandered back to the hotel in entirely the wrong direction via Piccadilly Gardens where drunken boys spilled out of bars and pale damp Mancunian girls, braving the bracing winds with nothing but a fake tan on their bare legs, brought back amusing memories of my own teenage attempts to effect the impossible.  Thank god for signs to the station or I might have ended up in Bury. One evening we took a collegial outing to another of Manchester's pleasures, East Z East, a fantastic indian restaurant, that had the added advantage of being at the base of my IBIS hotel on Princess Street, so at least on this night I did not get lost.

The conference over, I arranged to meet up with Big Bro and jumped aboard the tram for Salford Quays. Whoever picked the name “Media City” for the last stop on the line should be shot.  But setting that aside, Salford was a revelation.  In my memory, Salford was to Manchester what Queens is to Manhattan, a wasteland that, as the cab barrels along from JFK to the city, you close your eyes and think, “why have I come back to this”.  But Salford is transfigured! The economic upswing of the previous decade has transformed it into a kind of modern Amsterdam with beautiful well-designed glass buildings dipping their toes into the canals and waterways.

Salford Quays

Bro was waiting on the platform in the lashing rain with my sister-in-law, who is universally acknowledged to be “The Only Sane Family Member”. (God knows what made her marry into our line, particularly after becoming acquainted, in the biblical sense, with Bro’s feet).  Bro was wearing something tweedy that looked like it couldn’t make up its mind whether to be a trilby, a deerstalker or a cowboy hat.  Hats are a fetish in our family. At the height of the Cold War, my father, ever the rebel embarrassed us by wearing a Breshnev number.  Bro claims it is male baldness in a biting wind and not foppery that leads to this bizarre behavior. I am not convinced.  Arguing against this hypothesis our Dear Demented Sister, (DDS), who has voluminous hair, does it too. Her husband, “The Soul of Patience” has also fallen under our viral influence and I must confess that one Christmas I talked the “Long Suffering Husband” into buying me a hat that Ghenghis Khan would have been proud of.

Still it cannot be denied that a hat, any hat, however odd, was needed as we beat through the rain to the Lowry Museum. The Lowry was, when said and done, chock full of wonderful Lowry’s and, descending from a dynasty of Mersey Flatmen, I of course found myself particularly drawn to one of a large black barge beached in the mud of the Manchester Ship Canal. We viewed them all and then spent an equal amount of time in the museum shop buying ballast for the suitcase in the form of hefty books. Bro plied us with Gin and Tonics, and treated us to a wonderful dinner in the museum restaurant after which, merry and fed, we dashed off to see  Loves Labors lost done in a broad Lancashire accent.

Next day, as the rain continued to slash down, I settled into Bro’s sofa and opened my laptop.  There revealed in the browsing history, lay the full irrational extent of the homesickness -- all those listings of wind swept stone cottages in Wildboarclough. Bro was amused and I could see he was already weighing the prospect of a few holidays up there with some long hikes with a good pub at the end.  The Only Sane Family Member tactfully pointed out that inability to drive and advancing age might prove incompatible with life atop the peak district hills around Buxton where snow regularly cuts off the roads in winter.  The rain put paid to plans for a drive in the direction of “The Cat and Fiddle” to scout out “cottages I want to buy when I am rich”.  So instead we set off for Quarry Bank Mill to learn how our ancestors, The Mather’s, wove cotton. Of course this also meant the added delight of drinking pots of brisk tea and enjoying generous portions of cake -- good old National Trust.