Pam's Tall Tales

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

 

Violets

The difficult thing about being a parent is that it may take children 58 years or so to appreciate you.  When people die your relationship with them continues.  It’s just that the conversation becomes one way. They’ve had the last word. But they nevertheless continue to exert an influence in poignant ways.

My mothers love of corny Broadway musical records – the ones that made me cringe as a teenager - now provide quite a bonding experience for my sister and me – all those tunes etched into our young brains – now give us great fun - belting out the choruses at inopportune moments to embarrass the nieces.  My mother would also be surprised to know she passed on a love of Kathleen Ferrier and that we finally all took a trip to her beloved Port Sunlight. 

And then there are other associations that linger.  For many years after a particularly traumatic funeral I could not buy flowers. They made me physically nauseated. There were places I couldn’t go, and others I couldn’t leave. But this has now passed.

These days I find positive memories attached to certain flowers. I keep two bowls of violets, not because I grew up with them but because when I visited home as an adult, my mother had five magnificent specimens that she had cultivated, sitting on her bathroom cabinet.  After she died we all tried for several years to save them from neglect and keep them going.  It was some life-affirming thing to see them raising their little purple heads to enjoy the early morning sunshine. I keep mine the same way, in the bathroom, and today they bloomed. 

Last year I found myself buying a Christmas cactus for the same reason.  I spied it in the corner of a shop window under a table and brought it home.  It has just sprung a rash of tiny buds that will probably take a month or so to open. This means they will be covered in pink blooms around the time of my mother’s birthday. Ironically, I always forgot her birthday when she was alive and I only know it now because I keep a family tree - I’m not good on dates - and I make a particular point of forgetting the dates when people die - I prefer instead to remember how they nurtured the violets. 

Mishka the Book Fiend

It can’t be helped. I have become one of those batty middle-aged dog ladies.  

Mishka at Dag Hammersjold Park NYC

 

It started innocently enough with a casual perusal of the City Animal Care and Control (CACC) website. On a whimsy I filled in the “breed request” and pictures of plaintive bedraggled huskies started appearing in my mailbox. “Lets just go and have a look,” I told the long-suffering husband.  Foolishly he tried to dissuade with logic. But then he made the fatal blunder of forgetting our 25^th anniversary and guilt forced him to capitulate.  We trekked up to 110 and 2^nd Ave, the Spanish Harlem neighborhood that houses many waif and stray organizations.

 

No one with a heart enters the CACC and leaves without a dog. This is exactly how we got our old friend, Jack, seven years ago.  The city has an impossible task. A long queue of kittens in boxes and puppies on bits of rope preceded us to the sign-in. Once upstairs, forlorn dogs gazed out from row after row of cages.  Mishka was in the corner, unkempt, rail thin and according to his card owner abandoned. Even I was a little taken aback and nervous about his wolf-like stature but we took him out – he licked our faces - the die was cast. 

 

Mishka (aka Shadow) advert at the CACC

We picked him up the next day.”  Dazed and confused from the anaesthetic for his “operation” he stumbled out into the bright lights of the crowded waiting room like a convict on a perp walk.  We removed his “cone of shame”, bundled him into the car, and arriving home attempted to stow him quietly in the bedroom.  He let out a long and plaintive wolf howl. Jack sensing the intruder gave us a look of betrayal.

 

The main problem was that Mishka stank to high heaven. Soon, so did we, and every room we put him in. Even the vet said he had never met a dog this ripe. But baths were banned for 10 days and so we were relegated to sneaking in and out via the service elevator along with the garbage.  Unfortunately, Jack caught wind of him too, and, his suspicions now confirmed, he let it be known by throwing a 48 hour hissy fit that “the guest” had overstayed his welcome. Haggard from sleepless nights spent comforting one dog or placating the other I called our daughter the dog groomer for advice. Sensing her mother, who is generally a well-seasoned expert in self-inflicted crisis management, was at the end of her tether she refrained from the “I told you so” and, like the alpha female that she is, took charge and prescribed a crate for each dog.  It worked like a dream. Dogs love dens and as the crate was half the size of the average NYC studio the new arrival thought he was the Hilton.

Mishka thinking about brunch.

With their territories now amicably staked out the more serious problem emerged that Mishka continued to starve himself. Noting his runny nose the vet prescribed smelly foods, but his cold turned to kennel cough and then to sneezing blood up the walls and all over us – the vet warned us it could turn to pneumonia that would require hospitalization if he didn’t eat within three days. Of course it was a weekend followed by a bank holiday. We boiled up vats of liver all to no avail. As the 11^th hour approached and hospitalization looked inevitable I decided on one last tactic and planted Jack in front of Mishka’s crate. The sight of Jack scarfing down a big plate of liver dripping with Heme caused pack instincts to click in.  Recognizing it’s eat or be eaten, Mishka sat up and promptly wolfed down a bowl of dog food. We spent the next two days feeding him up, scrubbing the apartment and finally bathing the homeless man. 

Husky Meet Up 42nd st. Dog Run

 

Now that Mishka has settled in his cantankerous young husky personality is emerging. For example, he responded to being briefly shut in the bedroom by gnawing the bottom off the door. Last week he shredded a wicker dining room chair (after 25 years of service – it was a mercy killing).  Yesterday he ate the Calvin Klein bedspread. 

Mishka the Book Fiend Sharpening his Teeth

Of late he’s shown a literary bent – first he cut his teeth on “Treasures of Cheshire” and then took a fancy to “A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of Costa Rica”. I plan to channel his urge to recycle books, creatively, to rid myself of all the authors I don’t like. To this end all works by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner have been relocated to an appetizing level.  Then, of course, I'm trying to interest him in Dave’s pile that’s been gathering dust in the corner for twenty five years. Dave shares with Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, a love for excruciatingly boring books of the “Great Steam Ships of the World” genre – food for thought just waiting to be gnashed to smithereens.

 

 

Roadtrip to Michigan

The start of our two-day drive to Michigan for the Fourth of July 4 boded ill. In keeping with the holiday we tried to take the famous American escape route from the British, the George Washington Bridge.  An accident near the bridge caused a detour.  Two hours later we finally managed to exit of the Isle of Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel and drove hard across New Jersey. 

Bloomsburg PA

The interstate (I) highway system, like motorways and autobahns worldwide, is built for getting from A to B without seeing anything in between.  Every now and then I can’t take it anymore and we peel off onto the blue highways. We found respite, both culinary and spiritual, as we crossed over the New Jersey State border into the civilization of Bloomsburg, a small Pennsylvania college town. Bloomsburg was founded in 1802 like much of Pennsylvania, by German Burghers, and it shows in its weighty architecture. It’s a town I would like to go back to and explore more along with the dairy and quilting shops of the Amish that lie just to the South.  Pennsylvania is in fact an interesting section of I-80 that takes the entire afternoon to cross. In the east, rolling wooded hills give way at the mighty Susquehanna River to the central Pennsylvania Wilds, an area just south of the Allegheny Appalachia, comprising deep valleys and gorges. 

The Mighty Susquehanna River, Clearfield, PA

These are followed by hilly farmland with beautiful red barns, and fields — that look as if brushed to make them tidy — reminiscent of the Schwabian alps.

Classic Pennsylvania Farm

Crossing into Youngstown, Ohio the land flattens and the immense size and emptiness of the country becomes apparent, two hundred miles of pancake flat farmland, three times the size of Holland, dotted with red and white barns and farmhouses and the newer steel silos. 

Ohio farmland

We failed to make it to Toledo and ended up in a dingy but dog-friendly Motel 6 in Milan, OH just off the highway.  Jack at least was thrilled because he realized instantly that a day in the car and a shabby motel means he gets burgers twice a day.

In the US you can travel for half a day without seeing a change in the landscape but surprisingly the state borders are often points of abrupt change.  Wooded field borders signal the transition from Ohio to Michigan.The spruce begin even in the lower peninsula of the Michigan snowmitt.

Michigan Pine

 We drove up the middle of the lower peninsula sandwiched between Lakes Michigan and Huron. Five hours later we crossed the Mackinaw Bridge. The beauty of the Great Lakes is breathtaking. In summer, Lake Michigan sparkles a deep blue.  In winter the white sand beaches are lined with snow and ice.

Mackinaw Bridge

Gros Cap Roadside Park, Michigan U.P.

 Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, UP, is hailed by the local airline industry, American Eagle, as a playground for Chicagoans. In winter its snowy forests offer skiing and snowmobiling, but in summer its tundra nature is a force to be reckoned with and mosquitoes pound onto the window screen and feast on unsuspecting tourists. It’s a strange world of beautiful shorelines, towns with the exotic names of its Native American, French fur trapper, and Catholic Missionary past. 

Lake Michigan Shoreline, Hiawatha Forest, MI

 Deep forests and wildlife that bring with them an unsettling underbelly of hunters — knife shops are the most frequent tourist shop along the road after pasties and smoked fish.  The Mackinaw bridge empties into the Hiawatha Forest. 

Hiawatha Forest, Michigan Upper Penninsula

 Its logging and mining past is very interesting - this is Paul Bunyan territory with Tall Tales of lakes of blueberry pie and tree felling sagas that held my children spellbound around the campfire many years ago.

Paul Bunyan outside the Hiawatha Forest Tourist Information

The beaches are spectacular and empty, the water is clear and, lacking salt, is very refreshing.  Jack did not agree. His coat and paws are made for snow and ice and not for swimming. He would prefer the snowy beaches in winter. Besides he was eager for his third burger at Clyde’s, a family roadside drive-in in Manistique.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four hours later we passed through Escanaba and then sighted the big concrete bear and the Thirsty Whale in the next major town of Norway and arrived in Iron Mountain in the early evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cabin, nestled on the Menominee River, was beautiful but the mid-west heat wave struck the same day, driving the temperature to 105°F. We sweltered under the neighbor’s pines and camped out on Dave’s sister’s shady porch sipping gin and tonics, the tried and true British remedy for the heat and mosquitoes.

Edgewater cabins, Menominee River, Iron Mt, MI

Jack came down with an ear infection that required an interesting trip to the local vet. The clinic had an interesting wood carved totem of an indian lifting a bear cub that somehow got deleted from my phone. The vet clinic backed onto the iron mining museum and was situated near the few remaining miners cottages of Iron Mt.  In the 1800s The UP was a major center for mining of iron and copper.  Irish, Cornish, Italians and Scandiavians and others left their homelands to work for a dollar a day in the Michigan mines.

 

Twenty-five years ago we found a very old book in the basement from Dave’s uncle with the history of the mining in the U.P.  The Cornish brought with them mining skills from their local tin mines and of course their beloved pasties, now a local delicacy.  The book told stories of how the Irish would march out into the woods on a Saturday night to drink and brawl in “Hell towns” in the woods like Calumet, now a remarkable ghost town that I need to go back and photograph. It described the silent Scandinavian bachelor farmer types memorialized in “Lake Wobegon stories” and the Italians, short and stocky, who provided the muscle in the mineshafts and a few Dutch from the lower peninsula thrown in for good measure.  They came by the boatload through Staten Island and Sault Ste. Marie.   Dave’s 40^th class reunion told it all – tall blonds with short Mediterranean husbands – a melting pot of Izzos, Santinis, Eriksons, Van Lanens and Frendeweys (Vroegindeweij).

On July 3^rd the Frendewey's took a trip around the Spread Eagle Chain of Lakes just across the border in Wisconsin while picnicking on the pontoon boat.  The three brothers relived their youth and dived into the lake with the nephews and nieces.

At dusk we gathered with neighboring boats for the firework display. It was lovely, each boat lit by a single light gently rocking together in the calm and breeze of the lake. As the moon rose, candle lanterns were sent up. Then the fireworks began.

 

Lantern over Boats gathered on Spread Eagle Lakes MI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.    

“Remembrance Of Things Passed On The Way to Romsey And Why My Brother-In-Law Is Going Straight To Heaven”.

So, the Dear Demented Sister (DDS), insisted that the first “port of call” after disembarking from the overnight transatlantic flying sardine can, otherwise known as BA steerage, would be her new barge anchored in the Solent. Remembrance of her previous vessel “Marge the Flatulent Barge” that basked on an idyllic mooring in the Thames belching forth foul odors with every opening of the bathroom door, precipitated a battery of panicked excuses: age, decrepitude, the logic of unidirectional travel from Heathrow “TO THE SHIRES”. Last, I came clean and pointed out the compelling need for civilization in the form of FLUSHING TOILETS.  At this, DDS dug in her heels and threatened to take umbrage if sisterly dues were not paid at the point of entry.  Once provoked, DDS is, though nine years my junior, as the French would say, formidable.  She dispatched THE BLOKE to sally forth and take hostage.  Captured at the customs exit, I steeled myself for 48 hours of jet-lagged constipation. 

DDS and I do not share the allele for “love of watery places and living in cramped holds”.  I do not blame her.  As The Bloke would say, and often does, “I blame the parents”.  She inherited this trait from both sides: our paternal Evans clan built boats in Bangor and the maternal Holdens plied the Mersey on Barges since the days of yore.  She can’t help it.  The pleasure of living in squalor, beached on a mud flat, is etched deep in her genes.  I, in contrast, was handed down the landlubber allele; I cannot even swim.

The Bloke and I discussed DDS, and how she got to be that way, for two hours along the faceless motorway from Heathrow to Hampshire until we reached Winchester. There, at last, the road became familiar and I realized it was forty years since I had driven along it.  All that 18-year-old student’s angst flooded back.  Fifty-eight! How did that come to be!

DDS was waiting in the garden.  She piped us aboard the mighty “Salvador” and proceeded to the tour: a blow by blow account of sweat and toil poured fore and aft to transform the rusting hulk into a two-story edifice complete with sun deck, floating garden and an enormous yellow river room.  As we approached the stern, I braced myself for foul odors. DDS flung open the door and, triumphantly, flushed the toilet – the air was cool and pleasant.  Bliss -- not only was human sewage dispatched from Salvador in modern style but even the four felines who contributed liberally to the stench on Marge had been tamed by a magnificent feat of modern engineering that automatically sensed, scraped sterilized and spat reconstituted cat poop down a shoot, out the port hole and into the Itchen.

Impressed but in a jet-lagged daze I failed to pay due credit to these heroic endeavors. Reaching the bows I came to my senses and, leaping to make amends, proceeded to expound on the amazing beauty of guest quarters within the wheelhouse.  And beautiful it was, with windows all around, a place that reminded me of Dylan Thomas: 

“Captain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House dreams of never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S. S. Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him”.

Despite her water loving genes, DDS seemed unappreciative of these ruminations of the Welsh Bard.  She looked dismayed.  I realized too late I had unwittingly made the BIG FAUX PAS of the trip by lavishing praise the only part of the boat she hadn't yet renovated.

Still DDS is a generous spirit. Triumphant from her plumbing successes, she set aside the wound (at least for the time being – no doubt to be nursed as ammunition for future family feuding) and coerced The Bloke to take us on a drive down memory lane in search of all my old abodes and haunts.  We tracked down the Victorian hovel in Tennyson Rd, Portswood, took the Bevois Valley dive to St. Marys, still a den of sailoring iniquity after all these years, then set out for the dump I lived in at the back of Shirley High Street, the so-called longest high street in the UK, where the sausage factory wafted odors that could outcompete Marges’s flatulence. Mercifully roadworks diverted us. So after glimpsing the Tenovus Labs at the General Hospital where the “career” began we struck out for Romsey, my first real home.

The sun shone on Romsey, as it does always in my memory.  The corn market bustled, the bread shop still baked, and the Abbey, with my children’s school all set in stone at the side, stood solid. The Women’s Institute Hall, where we mothers would surge through the Abbey gateway when the door opened to scoop up beautiful branches and preserves, was still there. The white cottage, nestled in the Abbey buttresses, the one  “I want to buy when I am rich” was being renovated for some other dreamer. 

But alas, the Convent, site where my daughter played the stoutest little three year-old Virgin Mary that ever trod the boards in a dark blue sari,  was being torn down, the sacred heart of La Saggesse ripped out and its facade repurposed as a New Age spiritual healing center.  New Age Spirituality seems to have taken off in Romsey in a big way.  Soon it will look like Glastonbury, full of candle shops and spas and healing crystals – it must be the proximity of Stone Henge. 

We dallied in the Tenovus charity shop and bought a Panama hat for The Bloke, then walked along the salmon leap, and wound among the little shops.  There, in a cul-de-sac squeezed behind the Corn Market, we stumbled upon a gem:  Greenhill patchwork and quilting shop.  In my pre-career Romsey days, part of staying sane through the babies and isolation was to quilt a cover for my treasured Habitat floor cushion.  The same that was rescued from the attic of my divorce, the one that travelled with me over three countries and two continents and is now, though in irreparable tatters, stashed in a box where we “find a place to keep what we have lost”.  Oblivious to the fact that we had somehow also lost The Bloke in our meanderings, DDS and I dived in.  We emerged an hour later, purses emptied, with enough fabric to require a new suitcase or generate a large fine at the BA counter.  Only then, did we remember The Bloke, who will henceforth be referred to as “The Soul of Patience”. 

The Soul of Patience, accustomed to these things, and thinking to himself “we’ll have to feed the Old Bag at some point… and she’ll never go to bed when she gets over her jet lag” had gone off to the local supermarket to solve the problem of dinner.  We loaded up the provisions, but as we started to wend our way back, subliminally but acting in unison we subtlely diverted The Soul of Patience down a route that took in Hilliers.  DDS and I share the allele for “Love of Hilliers” -- the greatest garden center in the world.  We need to dig, just as the “Soul of Patience” needs the local pub, for our souls to be at peace.  Hilliers -- all those bike rides, all those years ago -- with two small children, a baby in the seat on the handlebars and a three year old perched on the carrier at the back, or standing on the cross bar displaced by the purchase of one too many plants.  All that twenty-three year-olds drive and energy -- that had to be dissipated peddling and digging -- where did it all go?

I asked “The Soul of Patience” what he thought about this need to dig in the most unlikely of places, to live in Manhattan yet subscribe to garden magazines, to construct ridiculously perilous gardens on the 53^rd floor of a New York City apartment.  And DDS -- the same -- her need to create floating vegetable patches on boats in the middle of rivers.  He was silent for a moment, kept his eyes on the road ahead, weighed his words, and then replied, “I blame the parents”.