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What I Did to the Turkey

30/12/2014

Every night, before I go to sleep, I write a diary page and a gratitude list. The latter helps me to practise being content with all the many blessings in my life, and helps head off the twin evils of restlessness and dissatisfaction. More often than not, my husband is on the list - and his kindness, tolerance and patience!

These were all put to the test on Christmas Day. Our son and daughter-in-law-to-be had come over for a jolly Christmas breakfast, and later we'd driven down to Hastings to visit my Mum and collect one of my brothers to stay over. Martin had left the majority of a beautifully-cooked (by his own fair hand!) turkey crown to cool in the oven. It would go in the fridge later ready for our Boxing Day friend-and-family lunch.

We got back home early evening, and while Martin parked the car, my brother and I went into the house. We were all hungry and all I could think about was getting the pizzas on. Martin took a good ten minutes to find a parking space, but when he walked into the kitchen he immediately spotted the oven was pre-heating, quickly whipped out its contents, now heating up nicely, and said, "Don't you think it's a good idea to remove the turkey before turning on the oven?"

Well, the old man let me off lightly - just this initial barb of exasperated sarcasm (and, later, a degree of good-natured ribbing). But I suspect the man's good nature may have been over-stretched if we hadn't stashed the carefully prepared 4 kg honey-glazed gammon in the fridge. We fought with our consciences before quickly coming to the conclusion that we could not feed a potentially lethal partially re-heated turkey to our loved ones the next day, and, being fortunate enough to have a local branch of a well-known supermarket nearby, were able to buy a replacement cold cooked chicken.

If you require further proof of his forgiving ways -

Some years back, when we had a very large vegetable patch in our former home, and our gardening bible was Geoff Hamilton's Successful Organic Gardening, Martin laboured long and conscientiously to raise a wide selection of good things for the family table. He had gone up to London one day for a television casting, and I thought I would be a good woman and clear the brassica patch for him. I cheerfully dug up the tattered remains of the Brussel-sprouts, cabbage etc, and then went on to the next row of plants. As I was hacking them into manageable pieces ready for the compost, I thought to myself, 'Well, I don't know, this stuff looks good enough to eat...", but nobly carried on with a determined will. Sgt Johnson, serving ranker in the gardening corps, nothing if not thorough.

Martin appeared late afternoon, home from the Smoke.

"Look," I said, beaming, "I've cleared the brassicas!"

"Oh, good," said Martin, looking round. "Erm, where's the purple sprouting broccoli?"

Yes, folks, I'd bashed the just-about-ready-for-the-table crop of this delicious vegetable to bits. That which my husband had grown from seed, thinned out, transplanted, de-slugged, tied up, and weeded over a period of months ... and he didn't even shout at me!

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Hi ho, Hi ho, to Christmas markets we go!

21/12/2014

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I didn't know the No 27 went to Rudesheim!

When we rose several hours before dawn last Friday from our comfy Premier Inn beds in Dover’s Eastern Docks and saw the waves whooshing up over the seawall we felt a little daunted, and when the ship pulled away into the choppy Channel, although reinforced by an excellent cooked breakfast, we anticipated a rough crossing. But we were fortunate - the ship was well-stabilised, and after about half an hour things settled down. It’s the first time I’ve travelled with DFDS: the staff were friendly and courteous, and the ship, including its loos, clean and comfortable. It’s also the first time I’d sailed to Dunkerque. It was quite a poignant moment, in the light of morning, seeing that coast where so many died in 1940 in the retreat from mainland Europe.

We were on our way to the German Christmas markets in Aachen, Koblenz and Rudesheim, and as usual I had a list of other things I wanted to do. It was rainy all weekend, with an exceptionally torrential downpour in Aachen, but even this could not dampen our appreciation of this beautiful German town. We just missed the Cathedral unfortunately (I wanted Martin to see it); the determined men on the door were barring sightseers because there was a service due. We bought some Printen from a bakery and had a peek inside the Rathaus. We ate some wonderful cooked fish from one of the market stalls. I hope to return some time with more than an hour or two to spare, visit the Couven Museum there, and take the Rathaus tour and see the Kaisersaal with its epic 19th century frescoes and statues of fifty German rulers.

So, on to Koblenz! Having researched thoroughly, I knew there was a cable car, so we made a beeline for it on Saturday morning. First though we checked out the Deutsches Eck, where the Rhine joins the Moselle, and the stonking great Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial, then we took the Seilbahn up to the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. It was amazing looking down over the mighty Rhine and I’m pleased to say I felt safe in the hands of German technology! The Fortress itself (we got a combined ticket for cable car and fortress) houses an excellent archeological and Landesmuseum, so we passed a contented hour or so wandering round. The highpoints for me included a footprint captured in clay of a Roman soldier in hob-nailed sandals, a piece of Neanderthal skull, a stone fragment etched with a frieze of stylised women dancing in a circle, and an original Roman piling from the bridge at Confluentia (original name for the settlement). We were quite awestruck by the multiple arches built into the fortress walls, which must have made them phenomenally strong. There’s a youth hostel in the fortress, one of over 500 in Germany - one of my dearly-held wishes (okay, somewhat over-ambitious, probably!) is to backpack round Germany and stay in every one of them!

On these fleeting visits, there is always more to see than time allows. I’d like to return one day to see the Church of St Florin, and the Ludwig Museum, housed in what remains of the former headquarters of the Teutonic Knights.

We did an afternoon excursion on our coach to Rudesheim. The last time I was there was in my late teens, when I was an over-enthusiastic partaker at a German wine tasting evening. I faintly recall learning about Spatlese wines, and having to be helped out to the car after drinking all of six glasses of what seemed like a light, fruity, harmless beverage! We took our second cable-car ride here, up over the Christmas stalls and the vineyards on the hills above to the Niederwald Monument high over the Rhine, erected to commemorate Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian war, and another example of massive 19th century German architecture. I heard once of a man whose mission it was to visit every Starbucks wherever he travelled - for me that would be cable-cars, as you might guess from the look of pure happiness on my face!

Cable-car over Rudesheim

Back at Koblenz that evening, we were planning to eat a hearty typisch German supper in the highly recommended Altes Brauhaus in the Braugasse, but it was booked out, so, seeing as the shops were open until midnight we concentrated on Christmas shopping and grabbed a bite to eat at a branch of the Nordsee chain. On the walk back to our hotel, which was near the city’s elegant Hauptbahnhof and very handy bus station, we noticed a medieval stone cross, erected in the town wall in 1667 offering thanks to God for Koblenz’s delivery from an outbreak of plague.

This trip was enhanced by having recently read Simon Winder’s book Germania and listening to Neil McGregor’s fantastic BBC Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation - both musts for Germanophiles like myself.

Our last port of call on the way back to Dunkerque was Bruges, the beautiful, historic ‘Venice of the North’, where reportedly the world’s first ever stock exchange was founded, and whose economic importance waned over time as the discovery of sea-routes to the New World moved business away. On a Sunday afternoon so close to Christmas it was inevitably besieged by visitors, and getting about the markets our walking was at times reduced to a shuffle. So after nipping into Hema on the Steenstraat for some chocolate gifts, and scoffing a delicious broadwurst in Simon Stevenplein, we slipped into the quiet sanctuary of the Arentshuis to see its Frank Brangwyn collection. We’ve long been fans of this underrated Welsh artist, who was born and spent his early childhood in Bruges. I’ve admired his colourful panels on the walls of Swansea’s eponymous Brangwyn Hall., and the World War One relief in Cardiff Museum, but it was wonderful to see examples of his furniture and ceramics, posters, a carpet, and, last but not least, I was actually moved to tears by his beautiful Stations of the Cross. Brangywn’s representations, for me, move Christ and his mother, the onlookers and followers, out of the iconic divine and into a very present, human world. Most definitely worth a visit, if you’re in Bruges and you want to see something truly extraordinary.

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Speaking in Tongues

9/12/2014

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'Constant knocking wears away the stone'

I'm learning Welsh at the moment, by listening to and following the original BBC Radio Wales series Catchphrase, first aired in the 1990s (Clinton was in the White House and John Major in Downing Street at the time). We downloaded all the episodes and we've had several gos at getting through them all but life has always intervened, so this is my latest effort! My husband comes from a Welsh-speaking family and did Welsh O-Level, but is not fluent, though he understands a lot. When he was growing up in the 1960s in South Wales many families spoke English with their children, and of course, culturally and politically things were different from today, lessons being taught predominantly in English in state schools then, and no dedicated Welsh TV or radio channels available.

I listen to Catchphrase in the car on the way back from work, so if you see a woman talking to herself in Welsh on a country road in the High Weald of Kent, that'll be me! Welsh is beautiful, and my only regret is that I didn't do this earlier in life, when I could have had some enjoyable conversations with my father-in-law, who spoke excellent Welsh. It always amuses me when I hear English people complain that, on entering pubs and shops in some parts of Wales, the locals continue to speak Welsh in their presence. It is their mother-tongue after all! Surely English tourists wouldn't expect the same, when en vacances, of a French person?

I've always loved languages, and, like my siblings, have inherited my mother's ear for picking them up and being able to reproduce their sounds so confidently that it can cause native speakers to think I know the lingo far better than I do! This can sometimes be embarrassing - that's what comes of being a natural-born parrot and show-off!

Dad, on the other hand, did not really have the language-learning gene, though he spoke English beautifully, and as a small child in India I believe he spoke both Hindi and Urdu. He spent years learning Spanish in his dressing-room when he toured with My Fair Lady, assiduously practising his pure text-book Castilian, but when he and Mum moved to Alicante in the early 1970s, he found to his dismay he could barely make himself understood. He related that, when going into a posada in the countryside and asking for a beer, his request went something like "Landlord! Bring me a flagon of thy foaming ale, that I may quaff it!"

Mum on the other hand had no truck with text books but picked up the local Valencian dialect in a matter of weeks, as she similarly did with Tyrolean dialect when she worked for several summers in Austria.

My formal language learning stopped at A Level, but early years with German au-pairs and summer holidays playing with a gang of kids from all over Europe in my Aunty Janet's campsite on the Ebre Delta must have given me a good foundation. Although it's decades now since I spent more than a week or two at a time in Spain, Germany or France, I can still dredge up enough basic language to get by. Inevitably, the holes in my vocabulary grow larger as the years flow by, but I dare say a couple of months immersion would restore fluency.

I saw a notice at the local library recently for learning British Sign Language. I'd like to do that, but maybe learning Welsh, and trying to buff up my German for a forthcoming Rhine Christmas markets trip, may be enough for the time being!

One of my colleagues speaks Arabic, Spanish, French, German and Chinese. I'm envious! And another clever young man I worked with, currently studying German and Russian at university, taught himself Swedish by listening on the internet. Good on them - any British person who makes the effort to learn another language is admirable in my eyes, and combats the deeply embarrassing spectacle of many who do not, including the majority of our politicians!

When I was a teenager, on holiday in Spain, there was nothing more joyous than sitting round with French, German, Spanish and Dutch friends and communicating in a hodge-podge, from one language to the next. We were young, and relatively free from the fear of getting things wrong. You see this even more in small children, who quickly improvise ways to play together even with no shared language.

It's worthwhile learning another language - it helps break down the barriers of ignorance andimproves mutual understanding and respect between our fellow human beings. If you didn't learn any when you were at school, why not join an evening class and give it a go?

Pob lwc!

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What I Did to the Turkey

Hi ho, Hi ho, to Christmas markets we go!

Speaking in Tongues

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