A Sad Little Poem on the Death of a Dear Friend

Today I am sad.
I am sad because my friend is dead.
That's the long and the short of it.
And it's funny because the most important thing she ever told me,
was that everything is a phase.
And it turns out that's not true.
And it turns out that's not really funny.
But it's slightly funnier than her being dead.
Which is one of the saddest things.

 

TW: Suicide. We learnt recently that one of the most important people in the making of us as parents, and as a family, took her own life. She built a wonderful safe space for new parents (and mothers especially) around her and gave so much to so many, including us.

It's often said that it takes a village to raise a child, and through her, hundreds of miles from our own families, we found our village. She gave good advice, and tea and brownies, but most of all she gave confidence. I shan't name her here as it still doesn't feel like it's my news to break, but I sort of had to say something somewhere (I am okay, this isn't a cry for help!). A lot of people have lost a lot without her here, many of whom will never now be lucky enough to know what they don't have.  

Be good, be kind, be understanding, listen and talk.

Take care my loves,

E. x

 

Samaritans are available on 116 123 by telephone - other means of contacting them are here.

 

Apple Cake with Crystallised Ginger and Dark Chocolate Flecks

Makes

1 kg loaf tin

Ingredients

1 Whisky Mac (25ml blended scotch whisky, 50ml ginger wine)

2 Apples

2 Eggs

160g Caster Sugar

120g/130ml Vegetable Oil

150g Plain Flour

1½ tsp Baking Powder

1½ tsp Ground Ginger

40g dark chocolate (70%+)

A handful of Crystallised Ginger

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / gas mark 4.

Grease a 1kg loaf tin and line with baking parchment – ensuring there’s enough to to pull the cake out with once it’s cooked. You can just line the long edges and base (saving paper and forgoing the pain of folding in the ends.)

Cut the apples into small chunks (around ¼ inch cubes – about the size of a standard dice) and place in a large mixing bowl with the whisky mac. Give the chunks a stir to ensure they all get a bit of a taste of alcohol. Don’t bother pealing the apples but do remove any visible blemishes as these will show in the finished cake.

In a large bowl, or using a mixer, whisk the egg and sugar until they start to puff up and go pale, before slowly pouring in the oil until it has all been incorporated. Be careful not to add the oil too fast or the mixture may split.

Using a spatula (or mixer beater attachment) fold in the flour, ginger, and baking powder into the mix until you achieve a smooth consistency. Then fold in the apple / cocktail mix.

Chop the chocolate into flecks and fold these and the crystallised ginger into the mix.

Pour the batter mix into the cake tin and bake for 35 minutes. Turn the tin around and bake for a further 15-20 minutes.

When done it should be springy to the touch and a knife should come out ‘just’ clean. If it’s taking its time cooking to the middle – lower the oven temperature and insert metal skewers (or all metal cutlery knives) through the centre of the cake until done.

Allow to cool in the tin for 15 to 20 minutes, if you have left the short ends of the loaf tin unlined, run a knife between the tin and the cake before releasing.

This cake can be eaten warm or cold, and will stand being frozen.

 

Backstory 

Did you know I (re)started this blog as a bit of a cookery blog? Well I did! Right back in 2011 when I went away to university and wanted to chart my cookery progress, setting out into the kitchen for the first time armed only with half a copy of Delia's complete cookery course and a set of knives so blunt you could ride to London on them and not cut your arse. I probably wouldn't bother with those proto-recipes now, but I have a few which I've developed over the years which I might feed in, with some thoughts, from time to time. 

This recipe is inspired by one from The Baking Book by Sarit Packer & Itamar Srulovich from Honey & Co (Saltyard books), which I heard on Simon Mayo's Radio 2 drivetime show. I much prefer ginger to nutmeg and my mum suggested that a whisky mac might make quite a good base for a ginger based cake. After some trial and error, here's the result!

Exam test 2021 - Paper 1 - Non-calculator

 A couple of people have asked that I provide a full pdf of my Exam test exam test paper. If you are considering presenting this to a young person please note that the words "cock" and "balls" are featured in question 15, and according to Ofcom those are a strong and a medium swearword respectively.

I'm delighted this little exam seems to have brought joy to people. If you have any questions, or would like your papers marked, feel free to send them my way - I'd love to see any answers!

You may turn over your papers now.

Stop writing!

2021 - New Years' Morning - About half past midnight

This time last year,
you danced in my mind's kitchen,
all v-neck and Chic and disco moves.
But there is no context where that you make sense here.
Retrieving a torn down breadstick box from the floor with your mouth,
Is not in right now.

2020 has been... quite the time.
You never experienced anything like it,
but I think,
given your appraisal of the heatwave of '76,
I'll perhaps explain it to you thus:
2020 - Wore slippers all year.

Observations from 1V64 approaching Taunton

There’s nothing quite like a train journey to make you realise how blessed the UK is with scenery, and what an absolute blight the general public is thereon (present carriage occupants who may be reading over my shoulder excepted). 1V64 leaves Edinburgh at 1307 and by the time I joined it at Derby it had already been on the rails for four and a half hours (technically, having been formed from a service starting in Birmingham in the morning, it had been in near constant motion for almost 10). Already past was the beautifully rugged section from Dunbar, the impressive bridges of Newcastle, Northern cities of Durham and York. From Derby to Birmingham I was treated to the repetitive throb and rattle of both loose interior fittings and the various musical choices of my fellow passengers in glorious 360 degree surround sound, the sights of the breweries of Burton doing little to ease my growing irritation.

Blessed relief from the chart hits (played with remarkable clarity through airpods and my neighbour’s head) came at the circle of hell commonly known as Birmingham New Street – the carriage largely emptied and my tablemate was very talkative once the offer of tea was made and accepted. There passed a happy few hours talking about travel (hers in India, mine across Europe, both happily by rail) as our train trundled towards Bristol passing the gorgeous Malverns.

At Temple Meads I bade my friend goodbye and my luck with ran dry. With wonderful Great Western architecture to both sides we were held waiting for a driver on a late running northbound service, and a member of the public with a great number of opinions and a voice with remarkable travelling qualities boarded. As the train waited he entertained the otherwise peaceful carriage with discussions on solar powered battery banks, the correct way to consume a sandwich if you are unable to wash you hands, and into which specific bin a compostable carrier bag aught to be disposed if it is to fulfil its composty purpose. Across from me sits a delightful fellow in sportswear – beside me sit his Adidas clad feet. We are now approaching Taunton, with luck we will be treated to the most wonderful late evening sun as we promenade at speed along the coast at Dawlish. If I’m very lucky indeed Taunton has the correct bin to dispose of a compostable carrier, but I fear that it might even be Plymouth.

Post Script 1 – Departing Exeter St. Davids

Taunton does not have the correct type of bin but fortunately Exeter does. Thanks to Britons having a generally awkward attitude to turfing people out of their seats I am still sitting next to some trainers. The rightful seat holders are quite loud so this might yet prove to be a blessing, but I think I’d prefer loud conversation to the sound track of a Mission Impossible by way of headphones and skull and occasional kicks to the elbow.

Post Script 2 – Passing Tavistock Junction

All is well with the world. The light held just long enough to enjoy the view of the boats at Teignmouth.

2020 – New Year’s Morning – Half past two.

At the turning of the last decade I was sixteen,

My hair fell past my spotty shoulders,

Hipster before it was cool I listened to all my music on cassette,

Much stolen by you from Croydon record library,

Via quite expensive tape recorder,

Onto finest chrome oxide tape.

Three and one quarter of one year later,

My hair much shorter,

I sat by your bedside and sang to you as you died,

A weight of grief and responsibility,

Landed squarely on those still spotty shoulders,

Sending fault lines through my life.

In the intervening seconds between then and now,

I’ve lived and stretched and grown,

I’m now half the age you lived to be,

I’ve married the girl who talked over the Archers,

Got a job (railways you’ll be glad to know),

Though I’ve still not fixed the car.

This last year we bought a house,

Mum thinks you’d like it,

And finally all those nights spent fettling in number 27,

Fitting floors and building shelves,

All planned to the last millimetre,

Bear their fruit in it.

And now I’m two hours into a new decade,

The first of mine unmarked by your dancing,

Yet when ‘Le Freak’ opened the 70s show on the radio,

There you were with me,

Strutting across my mind’s kitchen,

V-neck and jeans and disco moves.

Nobody can say what tomorrow brings,

But I’m glad for every yesterday we had,

Because when I set to on my next big project,

Part of you will be there,

Passing me the next screwdriver,

Marking off the cut list.

This (probably) isn't 1983 - the blame lies with all of us.

The following was first put out on my Facebook page at about midnight on Friday 13th December.

It’s another long one I’m afraid (and because I’m tired it’s littered with parenthesis and very long sentences broken up with funny commas all over the place, although I have managed to avoid the dreaded ellipses… so that’s something!) – but I hope it provides some optimism (or at least direction) and sanity in a political landscape that we perhaps view as having changed overnight.

Firstly – there are those on the left who would have us not point fingers at this time, and there are yet more what want to loudly shout whilst pointing fingers at anyone but themselves. Both groups are deluded and wrong, now is the time to point fingers, if we want to have a chance at gaining power at the next election we have to regroup and move as one, and to do that we have to understand what we did wrong, we have communicate where we think others have fallen short, and we absolutely have to reflect on our own choices and mistakes – because no group is without some responsibility.

The big headline from Labour’s perspective is of course the revolt in the “Red Wall”, I dare say there’ll be a lot of very public discussion, and some even more public blaming over who is responsible, but here’s my take. There are a number of short term issues which which the electorate had with Labour and which Labour failed to address, but there are more long term structural issues. After the 2010 result my dad and I had a good long chat about the future of Labour (he left the party in 2003 as a result of the Iraq war, I canvassed for the Greens in 2010). We both concluded that the New Labour project had run its course - Iraq, attacks of civil liberties we both agreed on, but dad picked up on something which I did not- the places most gutted by Thatcherism were reeling, even before the financial crisis they were increasingly left behind, and by 2010 they were starting to hurt and as a result were flirting with openly fascistic and racist parties (UKIP, the BNP and the English Democrats won 10% of the vote between them in Blyth Valley in 2010). Brexit and Corbyn are both short term issues which definitely had a big impact last night, but the communities that switched this time have been royally fucked over by both parties for a very long time. Farage and Brexit have offered desperate people the promise of systematic change - Johnson tapped into that hope and lied in ways that were hard to counter.

In 2015 Corbyn's campaign highlighted the left behinds, but they were talking about communities they'd never really claimed to represent, places like Falmouth and North Devon where rural poverty were biting, I think they gambled that their previously safe northern seats would remember Thatcher and what the labour movement achieved on a local scale during the collapse of British heavy industry, and forget Blair’s indifference to them, which is an irrelevance when Johnson says they should remember both and remember that he is "different". Labour badly misjudged how to handle Brexit, and the left have absolutely failed to communicate their policies - particularly how to handle communities in the North East where far right thinking has become the norm, but this has been a long time coming.

People, particularly those on the right of the Labour party are making comparisons to 1983 and 1992 but I don't think that's right, I think this is more like the 1930s (take for example the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election of 1931 where Mosley’s far right “New Party” split the anti-tory vote and delivered a Conservative on 44.6% of the vote). The Labour movement in the ‘30s was faced with serious issues – feelings of betrayal over McDonald’s coalition with the Conservatives, populist movements across Europe gaining power, and threats from overseas to British jobs to name but a few. A notable case study in defeating the fascist threat that filled the voids caused by these crises is found in the east end of London, traditional Labour party territory filled with working class people leading very hard lives in often terrible deprivation. London’s east end, with its docks and insatiable appetite for cheap labour was a magnet for new immigrant communities, and against this backdrop it was easy for the British Union of Fascists to start making inroads, much as modern day populist parties have done across white working class communities over the past 40 years.

I don't think the right option is to steer a course for a shiny new centrist Blair in an attempt to recreate 1997, but to do as was done in the ‘30s to take down Mosley and the BUF and counter inequality head on, actually doing work in these communities to make them better despite the government.
Momentum (for all its many faults) has mobilised and engaged people in numbers that really haven't been seen in the post-war era, but to almost no useful end. If a proportion of these people can be put to action actually tackling inequality, as activists did during the 1930s, perhaps there'll be a hope of redirecting the righteous anger felt in the communities that swung last night towards the people actually holding them back, rather than raging against bogeymen like immigration and the EU.

This is my personal view of where we need to start in the communities who’ve told us at the ballot box we’ve lost their trust, not just to make the labour movement relevant and electable, but to reduce the horrific effects a Johnson lead Conservative government could unleash – the specifics of how we organise to achieve it I do not know, though I would urge everyone reading this to join a trade union.