Life as a Cat. Or Life’s a Bitch?

I have clawed my way through the week.

I have wept when the internet failed and Hat watched forlorn as I battled to get a connection and all the while her Science lesson ticked away. She didn’t mind missing the lesson she said. But I knew she minded missing the contact. With Beth and Zoe and Victoria.

I have ranted at poor beleaguered Husband, ‘I don’t know what to do with myself all day’, I rage. So I do mad, nonsensical things like apply for editorial jobs in London. In London? In London! I live in an Outpost in Africa for God’s sake; what was I thinking? I ignore the email that comes back, ‘Your message sounds interesting. I would be interested to know where you are based? Perhaps you could also send me your CV and telephone number to discuss with you further’.

Where you are based. That’s the crux of the thing.

I have ploughed through water spangled with sunlight and strung with the last of the flamboyant blossoms and swimming with scorpions so I watch where I am going which briefly distracts me from my furious, tearful frustration.

And I feel better then. And I say sorry to my Husband. ‘ I’m sorry OK. I am confused and lost and lonely and bored. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself.’ and I fix the internet connection so that Hat can go back to school and I can assuage my lack of retail therapy with a wander through the cyberaisles at Amazon and Ebay. I might even pick up something pretty at Monsoon or Karen Millen to admire and quietly put back on an invisible shelf.

I am writing an article on what makes a survivor. Your DNA, your experiences, your exposure as a child, your support network – they all mesh to knit an armour-plate of resilience. So I owe it to my genes, my upbringing, my Husband and Hat to try harder.

Bugger this place. I will bloody well survive it.

Even if it kills me.

We have two cats.

One grey, one marmalade.

The marmalade is old – at least ten. We thought she was a he until the vet came to pick his/her pockets and found there were none. Orlando morphed into Orlanda. She is affectionate with a plaintive, pathetic miaow.

Moshi is grey. Moshi is younger. Moshi is fickle, and a bully. If Moshi were a woman she’d be the kind who flirted with your husband and bitched about you behind your back (at the top of her voice; there is nothing plaintive or meek about Moshi’s miaow) whilst borrowing your best shoes and never bothering to return them. And she’d be beautiful, where Orlanda would be plain and kind and dependable.

Orlanda discovered that the thick foam padding discarded from the packing around an oven made a fabulous bed, perfectly feline-shaped and warm. She enjoyed it for precisely three days until Moshi copped on and with exquisite ease and subtle, silent, exacting tactics evicted Orlanda and occupied her space.

Now she spends her days atop her illgottengained bed watching the world go by in an imperious and slit eyed manner, whilst Orlanda seeks refuge with the dogs.

At least Moshi will leave her alone there I think.

Doing Your DoughNut

Somebody says, ‘I couldn’t do what you do’.

They mean sit in the Outpost, detached, distanced. Lonely, mostly.

The assumption being, of course, that that is what I do: sit. Just sit.

But I don’t. Sit. (I mean I do: but never for long).

They gesture the pool, ‘do you ever use it’.

Every day I say. ‘I swim nearly a kilometer every day.’

I should swim, they say, I need to get fit.

I don’t swim to get fit. I swim to keep sane. 

And I don’t sit still for fear that staying in one place for too long might mean I become rooted to the spot.

Finding your niche is good. Getting stuck in a rut isn’t.

Funny that.

So I have found a peculiar kind of groove in Outpost life. One where I keep moving for fear my demons will catch me and gobble me up.

Do you read much?

Yes. But never during the day. Only late at night.

Do you watch the television?

Yes. But only after dark.

I sound like a control freak. But I don’t care. I’m not disciplined. I just know that direction is the only thing that keeps me going. Keep moving. Forward. Towards the light.

********************

Hat and husband ask, ‘have you written your blog lately?’

Not much, I reply, ‘I don’t think I have much to say’.

They don’t argue the point.

They live here too.

*******************

But they prod my conscience. You can’t just give things up in the Outpost or you might give up altogether.

And so I help Hat make doughnuts. We roll and cut dough cool from the fridge.

We watch it bubble satisfactory and dance a jig in hot oil.

‘Always be very careful when you are deep frying’, I tell Hat, because it seems important to use the exercise to teach her something she didn’t know. (Because sometimes the worry festers: should I hold her captive here?).

Why?

And I don’t know why. Except that it’s very hot.

‘Because it will give you a nasty burn.’

We scoop golden doughnuts from carefulitdoesn’tburnyoufat and drop them onto sheets of newspaper and dredge them in icing sugar and Hat say, ‘look, like a snow storm’.

And then we eat them. For tea.

And we put one aside for her dad and when he comes home he will applaud our small act of warm domesticity because he knows how hard it sometimes is to put one foot in front of another when you’re not entirely sure where it is you’re going.

*******************

The garden has yielded a crop of leeks. Feathery-sage-strappy leaves atop cottonwhite bulbs.

I harvest a handful to accompany a roast chicken for supper.

I slice them into fat pennies and toss them into a pan with some herbs.

Sautéed leeks, I think.

And then I get distracted. By an email. By something Hat says. Thumbing a text message. Because I can’t sit – or even stand – still and patiently sauté.

Until I smell smoke.

And I look into the pan and the leeks are near charred.

But leeks from your own garden are too precious to chuck out. Especially in an Outpost.

So I serve them up with a flourish: caramelized leeks I tell my little family.

And they eat them with relish.

My accidentally caramelized leeks.

My secret.

 

Green Fingered …?

It has rained. Hallelujah! The lawn is blushing green. Just a blush, mind. Not about to incriminate itself yet as wholly-happily irrigated.

Husband is possessed of post-storm fervour and marches around our tiny veg patch shaking packets of seeds in my direction. He is going away this week. Because he is busy and import and employed. I, because I am not (busy, important, employed) am staying put. And as such am In Charge of the veg patch for the next six days. Which means I must Pay Attention to what he is telling me about where to plant maize and carrots and must try not to kill the coriander like I did the beans when I drenched them with some toxin to evict spider mite population.

‘You said 15 mls of insecticide to 25 litres of water’, I mumble in feeble protest as we stand observing dying, gasping, jaundiced crop.

‘I didn’t mean you to pour the whole effing 25 litres on 12 plants. Fercrissakes, that was enough for the whole garden!’. (which, for the record, is nearly 2 acres).

‘At least I got rid of the spider mites’, I point out uselessly.

I did. They donned mite-sized gas masks, packed their bags and moved hastily off to the lovely healthy coriander  plants to the left.

 Still. At least the Flamboyant looks lovely. I don’t have to do anything with that.

Which is probably just as well?

How to Play Poker

 

The book Hat presents to me is beginning to shed leaves, its spine is collapsing, and the pages are glued together with age and the ancient escapees from many mixing basins.

It was mine, and the childish handwriting that denotes ownership indicates I can only have been seven or eight.

Look! I Can Cook! it says on the front cover. Not that it worked for me, necessarily, or I wouldn’t need to do what I’m doing now. But it was a lofty challenge delivered by my mother, I think, for a birthday. Perhaps my 7^th?

It sat squarely and brightly upon a kitchen shelf alongside Katie Stewart and the unassuming Kenya Cookery Book, and its jacket, for all the colour and the confident assertion of culinary success, made you want to pluck it out and pursue the baking of Lemon Meringue Pie or Lazy Daisy Cake.

Cooking with mum as a child brings back memories as warm-sweet as the jam tarts we made (with their syrupy-strawberry insides and papery-flakey pastry cases which we ate with a dollop of fullfatfarmfresh cream because we were little and cholesterol hadn’t been invited). Something about the togetherness and teamwork that came from being captured in the same small space and then, later, sitting down around a table, carefully laid for tea, to enjoy the sticky fruits of our labour.

My brother and I stood upon upturned crates so that we could see what Mum was doing on the too-high kitchen counter, we deliberated carefully about which recipe to tackle (and sometimes the deliberation was cut short because, as in the Outpost of the noughties, Kenya in the early seventies, lacked gastronomic delights). Katie Stewart’s Cherry Russe remained a figment of mouth watering imagination forever and eternally replaced by sturdy Scotch Pancakes. Which never sounded as exciting on the page but which – when warm from a griddle and saturated with treaclesweetness – were just as eagerly devoured so that the Cherry Russe was quite forgotten.

We assisted with the gathering of ingredients, sifted flour and left a dusting of snow across the floor, we beat eggs and sugar with an electric hand whisk and when we were done and our offering in the oven we licked the paddles clean, sitting on the kitchen floor and carefully regarding one another’s prize for any signs of unfair distribution of the spoils.

Delicious. The taste and the recollection.

And so Hat brings to me the same book and asks if she can make Chocolate Cake and I, because I am hell bent on some new sanity-saving exercise (namely to anchor my fleeting self in food and words) leap from my chair and offer my services.

Together we gather flour and butter and sugar. Together we seek the paddles for a similar hand whisk (not the same one but one almost as primitive to satisfy the craving to do things in precisely the same way I did with my mother 35 years ago) and together we begin to weigh flour and cocoa.

Hat beats the ingredients until the mixture is feather light and fluffy and so air filled it seems to sigh with pleasure as bubbles rise to its velvety surface and pop languidly. We tip it into two tins greased using newspaper so that the butter has blackened from the ink and we put them in the oven.

Later we sandwich them together with a butter icing stained with instant coffee. As a child we flavoured our own with Camp Coffee Essence.  But Camp doesn’t exist anymore, and definitely not in the outpost so Hat and I improvise with Nescafe. And with the two halves clinched together in a mocha kiss, we decorate the top with glace icing  and I show Hat – just as mum showed me – how to spread it with a knife dipped in boiling water so to iron it to a glossy satin sheen.

Hat doesn’t lick out the bowl – a long ago experience of giving all my children salmonella poisoning on account of raw eggs has left me nervous of bowl licking.  Instead it’s for the washing up, not the dogs as was the post baking habit of a friend called Sue who laid the empty basin on the floor for her Labradors.

We eat thick slices later playing cards by candlelight during a power cut and Hat announces that she plans to teach us how to play Poker.

And I thought I had her adult education in hand with cooking lessons?

Chocolate Cake

6 oz of each: butter, sugar, self raising flour (a bigger cake and you just increase proportionately)

3 big eggs (4 if you’ve been tempted to go for 8 oz of each …)

A hefty spoon of cocoa powder

Bung the lot into a basin and beat until smooth and creamy.

Tip it into greased sandwich tins and bake until the cake has risen and is coming away from the sides.

When cool, remove from the tins and ice with whatever takes your fancy: cream if you have it or, as we didn’t, butter icing and a cocoa glace on the top.

Eat whilst playing Poker.

 

.

Why I Learned to Concasser Tomatoes

I did not know how to concasser tomatoes.

Concasser?

I can slice them. Dice them. Even strip them of impossibly thin skins.

But concasser?

I am referenced to an earlier page in my 500 Recipes for Vegetables and Salads (which is very old fashioned for its inclusion of a Carrot Ring Mould circa 1972, and supremely optimistic given that here in the Outpost I possibly encounter just 5, which includes, obviously, for I must learn to concasser them, tomatoes).

And so – as directed – I turn to page 63 which describes concasséed (and the accent persuades me I am dealing with something eminently grander than usual Outpost fare) tomatoes as skinned, quartered and de-seeded.

And I consider – as I begin to gather my ingredients together – whether the regular focus on something new to cook, to eat, will concentrate whatever loneliness I might feel, reduce it and boil it away to nothingness? Elizabeth Gilbert sought herself in her book, Eat, Pray, Love. Italy. Indonesia. India. The places she visited, all beginning with the letter I, and so she pondered, appropriate given that she was on a voyage of self discovery. I.

But I’m not. I don’t need to find myself. (I have always dismissed the notion as mildly self indulgent – well, it’d have to be, wouldn’t it?). But I need to discover some old facet of me and polish it to a new and enduring brightness.

Why not cooking? Can a failed domestic goddess emerge as an aspirant one?

In an effort to avoid insanity born of loneliness and a fractured identity and the flailing lack of direction that comes with the losing of direction and maps, why not food?

Mashed potato with butter and salt. Soul Food.

Words. Food for the Soul. Always.

Can I – then – not expect the marriage of the two to be a happy one?

The effort will prove challenging on two fronts.

I am not naturally an aspirant Domestic Goddess (despite eternal admiration of those who are) and the Outpost does not lend itself easily to domestic divinity.

You can’t get mascarpone cream here.

Or feta.

So I shall need to improvise.

To muddle along.

Which I have grown good at. I muddle a lot in the Outpost.

But I don’t need to muddle the tomatoes for I know, now, how to concasser.

 

Carrot, Tomato and Date Salad.

A handful of carrots, a couple of tomatoes and a few fat dates – I am not one to follow recipes closely, I have a greedy family: if a chocolate cake recipe suggests it’ll feed 8, it won’t, not in my house, so I manipulate measurements as much as I am forced to ingredients.

And a good slug of olive oil, a similar amount of vinegar, a pinch of salt, some black pepper generously ground and a few sprigs of basil (which grows – in my case – in the hollowed out bowl of a discarded canoe which I salvaged from the shores of the dam and which is valiantly battling the drought).

Grate the carrots, concasser the tomatoes, separate and save the seeds, chop the dates. Bung all that into a bowl. Then tip the seeds, the oil and vinegar, the salt and pepper and some shredded basil (never chop it, always shred it with your fingers, though I do not know why) into a small saucepan and stick all that on a low flame and bring to a slow simmer.

The kitchen will be filled with the delicate scent of basil and your eyes with well as they are stung by the piquancy of the vinegar. When it’s reduced a little, tip it through a sieve to get rid of the flotsam and jetsam and then pour the resultant dressing, which should be honeyed pink, onto your salad so that it can marinade in the warmth and the sharpness of the vinegar be slowly mellowed by the sweetness of dates.

Pop it in the fridge until supper time when it’ll be prettily glazed with the chill and striking for the psychedelic combination of never-wear-together red and orange of tomatoes and carrots, and bedecked with ebony shards of date.

We ate it with fillet steak and big floury boiled in their jacket potatoes. Hat and husband were very kind, which means they will get it again which mightn’t have been what they meant.

And I made a dent in my longlonelyoutpost day and felt a mild sense of something like achievement, a small, warm glow of happy satisfaction.

Shirley Conran, who wrote Superwoman in 1975 claimed ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’.

But then she didnt’ live in the Outpost where stuffing a mushroom or for that matter, concassering a tomato might be all that stands between you and the madness wrought of isolation and redudancy.

I wonder if I can find one here …

 

Empty Promises. Emptier Ponds

 

BEFORE

 

The lawn (and I use the term loosely, so loosely as to be almost completely untied from the truth) is popdom crack dry.

And the termite tunnels, like a busily woven subway engineered for – by – a population of insects which, when the rains comes, will take energetic flight only to die upon a damp morning or be eaten by the cats, are meringue fragile beneath my bare feet.

And the succulents shrivel and atrophy. I thought that was the whole point of cacti: that they could survive the fiercest heat, the meanest drought.

Unless they’ve had the misfortune to be planted in the Outpost.

Clearly.

Showers are short and furious and quick. I grapple for the tap to rinse the soap from my eyes. And I curse.

And every morning I wake to high, high blue skies unsullied by even the tiniest smudge of a cloud. Bugger it, I say. (For I am more polite than Alice de Janze).

The water department comes to lay a new pipeline. Because the old one, the one this particular house has depended upon since the days of colonial administration, has died a death. Given up the ghost of whatever faint promise of water it once held. And occasionally, very occasionally, twice or (when you were really lucky) thrice a week and for 25 minutes at a time, delivered on.

So the water department digs an untidy trench (when they are not leaning on jembes and smoking cigarettes) across the desert that masquerades as my garden and they lay a line which they optimistically fit with taps. And a meter. To measure the gushing torrent that they swear will come surging through.

They tell us the price of the water (Christ! Says husband, you could wash in petrol) which, they assure us, will arrive on Sunday morning. At 6am. Not a minute later.

Husband and Hat and I lay elaborately drenched plans.

We will fill the pond where the guppies are gasping and the lilies dying.

We will fill the pool which is low and green and swimming with boatmen and scorpions.

I will do three loads of laundry, in flagrant twofingersup to my usual once-a-week and please-wear-your-shorts-for-more-than-a-single-day regime.

We will give the succulents and the portulaca and the spinach a long, cool drink at sundown.

We will have recklessly lengthy, hot showers and the shampoo will not sting my eyes for I will rinse long and luxuriously without turning the taps off once in between. Not until I’ve well and truly finished and am squeaky clean.

At 6am on Sunday morning 17 drops of water fall feebly from the newly laid line into our cavernously empty tank.

Drip. Drip. Drip. I can hear the applause at the bottom as they hit the concrete depths.

And then silence.

We have tipped the guppies into the pool, to join the boatmen and scorpions (what will they eat, Hat asks? I promise her there is sufficient fish food in the flora and fauna that thrives in the unseen aquarium green). We closed our eyes to a garden wilted beyond rescue. And I mine to a laundry basket suppurating gluttonous and overfed across the bathroom floor.

The succulents and the portulaca and the spinach won’t get their evening drink.

But I will. A long, cold beer.

Which I will sip from a sweat-beaded bottle as I gaze across a lawn baked to the colour of biscuits and a sky shot with all the peachy radiance of an unblemished sunset so that you know tomorrow will be just as high white hot as today.

AFTER

Shortening Shadows

 

The flamboyant drips red into the pool below. Like blood.

I’m glad it’s in flower. Full fat flameflared flower. It bore only a few shy blooms last year.

And then the tree next door fell down and, as if to make up for the loss, or just because it no longer had competitive, crowing, colourful audience, it has come into glorious hot blossom.

Stark redblooded contrast to the dead baked biscuit grass.

We have been home for two weeks. Hat and I.

Our feet barely touched the ground, our suitcases barely opened and we were off again.  Sometimes Outpost life is so slow moving you can barely hear it breath. And sometimes it whizzes past in a blur of bags and trying to remember to pack your toothpaste this time.

My middlefordiddle is ensconced in her Home Counties boarding school and braving her first imminent winter and I am trying to distract myself from long shadows. It feels all wrong that she is not here: a gap where we should be five. A full house five.

 

 

But eldest is home for halfterm. And I have a writing gig.

It meant four days in the glorious bush bound seclusion of Katavi, in Tanzania’s Wild – wildest – West.

Where the sun is high and shadows are shorter.

 

 

So from England’s autumnal winter and ever thickening woollies, it was to still, steaming afternoons which melted in the broiling heat; you could hear the hiss of cicadas, like too many insistent pressure cookers on the agitated boil.   Sometimes the breeze gave an impatient sigh. But that was all.   One tiny, tired puff.

 

 

Lions lay somnolent in the deep shade of Tamarind trees; hippos hunkered as low as they could in chocolate mousse mud and crocodiles’ smiles grew wider as they lay inert, hideous, jaundiced mouths ajar.

 

 

‘Is that so that they can catch a passing bird?’ asked Hat.

‘No’, I said, fanning myself with a road map, ‘that’s so they can keep cool’.

‘I think they look mean’, observed Hat, and she began to sing, never smile at a crocodile …

She missed three days of school. She learned to tell the difference between a male and a female hippo; she spotted a python in a tree, an owl on a dust spangled evening game drive, four lionesses crossing a river (hop, hoppity hop they went: cats on a hot tin roof, or over a murky water way where they could not see crocodiles lurking log like and treacherous in the shallows).

 

 

She lay in her tent at night and listened to the soft tug and pull as passing elephants grazed close to where she was trying to sleep. She wasn’t scared.  ‘Isn’t it funny’, she observed at breakfast the next morning, ‘such big animals and you can’t hear them unless they’re eating’. Cushioned pads pillow their footfall and muffle the sound to softest silence.  

Three weeks ago she was listening to the rush of London traffic, the beat of feet on fast city streets, the reverential hush of the National Gallery, the entertainers in Covent Garden …

 

 

And now we really are back. No more safaris on our immediate horizons. Just a powder blue sky which yawns to white hot as I scan optimistically for scudding clouds: it’s that time of year. It’s the ‘when’s it going to rain’ time of year.

And Hat is doing maths homework.

And I have finally finished unpacking.

And the flamboyant is dipping her scarlet painted fingers in the pool and tracing a crimson pattern.

 

Old Photos

I need old photographs. For a project. Mum and I return from a walk and mum digs out albums and dog-eared envelopes and we scatter pictures across the floor. Hat, immersed in maths homework, is quickly distracted.

Awww mum! Is that you? She asks, and points to a photograph of me circa 1960something.
Look how blonde you were!
(I pay hairdressers fortunes to emulate what I had aged 3 ½)
Cast back in time.
My mother with a beehive and a cinched in 23 inch waist. My dad all buff and bare-chested. Paul Newman blue eyes.
We laugh at pictures of my brother perched in the birdbath; my baby sister birthdaysuit clad and bald as an egg; myself screaming indignant, red faced and cross, into the lens.
‘Which one next?’ demands Hat, reaching for another album, Pythagoras Theorems’ abandoned.
And so for two hours we are thus immersed. ‘That’s your mummy when she was six, that’s your mummy when she started school … and that’s your grand-dad’.
And then there’s a gap.
A few empty pages, a cold white hiatus between sunny 1985 Africa and the marbled chill of our first Christmas in England.
And Dad is gone.
There is a photograph of him and me. I remember when it was taken: at the airport when I flew to London to seek my fortune. I am wearing a jumper mum had knitted for me. It is grey and pink. And far too thick for a sultry February evening on the equator. But I wear it anyway. Out of loyalty. Dad is beside me. His hand in mine.
For a moment we are silent. ‘That’s the last time I ever saw Dad’, I say to mum.

I know, she says.
And then, ‘is that a cigarette he’s holding?’.
‘Mum’, I laugh, ‘you find me a picture where Dad isn’t holding a fag’.
And she laughs too.
And we turn the page.
Because life goes on.

Guess Where?

 

 

 

Sun, sea, sand, sky, white wine (too much of it), sunburn, cold nights, warm evenings, long drives, short flights, oysters, chocolate, old friends, young family, spinach, the black stuff, the red stuff, the right stuff, a lot of laughter, a few tears, hellos and goodbyes, socks and sandals (but not together, obviously), forty shades of green, bright lights, street fights (only kidding), dairy cows, funny accents, silly hats, designer shoes, no smoking …

 

Guess where I’ve been?

Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

And the blackberries lie crestfallen at my feet. The sloes are fatly bruised-blue in their place. I’d collect them if I had a bottle of gin to drop them into.   I’m fearful to buy one for myself, though A bottle of gin, please. Mother’s Ruin, that’s what my grandmother called it. (And Chardonnay isn’t?)

We gathered blackberries one hot summer evening. The girls and I. The branches hung less heavy; the fruit was beginning to drop where it lay on the ground, crushed, dejected, to bleed into my hems. Amongst the thorns, though, there remained a few, plump and jewel coloured and difficult to pluck without risk of spiteful thorns dragging at our skin, clutching, as if resentful of the small, last bounty we stole.   My bowl remained empty. My fingers blackened.

Mum! Stop eating them, my daughters admonished, they’re for supper!

I carried on regardless, popping fruit into my mouth and savouring sweet, late, warm summer on my tongue.

You’re going to get a sore tummy, they warned crossly.

I didn’t.

Which just goes to show how often, as a mother, I must have been wrong.

 **********************

I have been sewing on iron-on name tapes. Sewing because they resist my ironing, curling in complaint, refusing to lie obligingly flat and still.

Name tapes and shoe cleaning kits and regulation sports shirts.  Boarding school looms.

My daughter starts at hers on Tuesday.

I have taught her how to use the ATM. I have watched her describe her first formal signature. I have failed to teach her how to iron. I have bought her tights. I have argued with her over which winter coat is appropriate/affordable/adequately warm.  I have giggled with her as we packed a bag of toiletries. I have watched television with her head in my lap.

I have shared my English telephone numbers with her: your gran’s; your great aunt’s; your Godmother’s – the contacts I hope will fill the gap my going home will force.

And I wonder what will stop up the one she leaves behind?

**************************

And on the subject of schools, I’ve got a post at Schoolgate at The Times today which explores the argument between the IB and A’levels …