Final Hug

The Corsican pine in our garden, planted short-sightedly by the people who lived here before us, was getting bigger every year. Already 40 ft tall, it could have reached 120. It's not really a garden tree - unless you have some kind of country estate. It's more of a shelter belt or forestry tree. It was leaching all the goodness out of the soil and sucking up tons of moisture (the soil's dry and sandy enough, anyhow, here on the Trent valley flood plain). The garden was getting darker and shadier, stifled by the ever spreading, ever thickening branches. We were becoming restricted in what we could plant. And the pond at its foot was permanently clogged with pine needles and cones. It was no good. It was the wrong tree in the wrong place. It had to go. So we sought permission from the County Council. We checked there were no birds' nests. Then we called in the Tree Man.

There was time for one last hug ...

    

... before the Tree Man ascended in full tree climbing gear, chainsaw dangling ...

This guy is in his seventies. Hope I'm as fit as him at his age ...

Nearly there ...

Topped!

The tree trunk rings showed it was twenty-five years old.

A Passion For Food: Marmite (4)

There are certain things that you have to be British, or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: skiffle music, salt-cellars with a single hole and Marmite (an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant). BILL BRYSON

There are some things I desperately miss about England while travelling for longish periods abroad: The Guardian, fish and chips, Radio 4, green grass after rain ... and Marmite. You probably won't be surprised to hear my love of Marmite stems from early childhood. On cold, wintry evenings, as my sister and I sat reading before a coal fire, mum would bring us mugs of steaming hot Marmite with little pieces of soggy white bread floating on top. Even now, if I want the ultimate comfort drink on a chilly night, it's to Marmite I turn. Its savoury aroma and salty taste bring back the sensations and emotions of childhood in an instant, just as that famous madeleine cake dipped in tea provoked Proust's involuntary memories of the past.

Funnily enough, when Carmen and I married, the first house we bought lay just a few miles from the Marmite Food Extract Company's factory in Burton-on-Trent - itself within spitting distance of the Bass Brewery. Their proximity to each other was no accident: Marmite, a yeast extract, is a by-product of the beer-making industry. Later our first child, Anna, was born in Burton - and Nicholas too, a little after that. You could therefore imaginatively argue that both have beer and Marmite as interlocking strands in their dietary DNA - though it's shaken out that Anna likes Marmite not beer, and Nick quite the opposite. I vividly remember pacing the hospital car park, with the smack of yeast and hops in the air, worrying about the small son to whom my wife had just given birth (he was lying in an incubator, after arriving as a 'blue baby' with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck).

'Marmite' is French for a large, earthenware cooking pot, and Marmite was once produced in a smaller version of such a pot. Nowadays it comes in glass jars, but on each jar there's a picture of the original earthenware container. I tend to spread it with butter on toast, and with cheese on crackers and crispbreads. I also like to add a spoonful to some soups, stews and gravies - a great alternative to umami. And, perversely, I even like it on slightly sweeter foods like scones, malt loaf or Lincolnshire plum bread.

But whatever your feelings are about this sticky, dark brown elixir, this salty, savoury, tongue-tingling paste, this bitter, malty, spicy, black balm, this gooey, yeasty spread which is half solid, half liquid and thick as molasses  - and people tend to love it or hate it, with no half-measures -  just never be tempted by its antipodean rival, Vegemite. It's a pale imitation of the real thing and ain't half as good! 

Walking The Edge

It's a perfect evening on the Viking Way. The sun shines in a calm blue sky. Even at 8 pm it's mid-afternoon-bright. From Byard's Leap I follow a green tunnel south for several miles ...

This part of Lincolnshire is known as the Heath, or the Cliff, or the Edge. It's a thin band of limestone, a low plateau 150 ft higher than the clay land to east and west. The Romans built a famous road upon it: Ermine Street, which ran straight as a die from London to York. And in WW2 the military found it an ideal site for airfields, as it was flat and faced Germany. (Lincolnshire became known as 'Bomber County'.) For all I know, this rogue strip in the middle of cornfields may once have been a runway ...    

Monotonous views of endless crops stretching to distant horizons are certainly most people's image of Lincolnshire ...

... though as always - if you look hard enough - variety, interest, colour and texture can be found almost anywhere ...

This one-time wild heathland - a habitat rare in Britain - is now intensively cultivated with wheat and barley, potatoes, sugar beet, and oil-seed rape ...

Scarlet poppy heads stipple the green.The purplish-brown tips of barley whiskers silkily ruffle a sea of corn. Tits and finches sky-dance jerkily from bush to bush. And briar roses turn their pale pink petals to the remaining sun. I walk the Edge in the dimming light. Edge of limestone and clay, plateau and vale, heath and weald, holloway and skyway. Edge of field and path, hedge and ditch. Edge of day and edge of dusk. Edge of darkness. Edge of light. And edge of my life.  

A Passion For Food: Adolescence (3)

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

After a monotonous, unvarying childhood diet of roast beef on Sunday, cold cuts of beef on Monday, beef stew on Tuesday etc., all accompanied by vegetables freshly picked from the garden and freshly boiled into watery oblivion, tea at a friend's house came as a minor revelation. Instant rissoles, fried straight from the pack! No doubt containing all kinds of additives, preservatives, flavour enhancers and minced-up, mangy bits of offal no self-respecting butcher would dream of tendering. These exotically wrapped, factory-produced, gunk-filled pastry shells seemed at the time so excitingly different from my mum's wholesome and hearty offerings. I liked the artificial, extra salty, sugary, oily piquancy of them. More crucially, my friend relished them. So I relished them too. Later I breathlessly praised their tasty virtues to mum who, bless her heart, did buy a few packets from the Co-op especially for me, though it must have pained her to do so. She must have thought this was the start of a slippery slope towards culinary degeneracy.

Once two friends and I cycled with camping gear to Woodhall Spa, a small nondescript resort east of Lincoln, whose glory days had long vanished. (One of these friends was a vicar's son, a maverick and an outsider, who played guitar, wrote songs and later drove a bright yellow Hillman Husky with a gaping, rust-rimmed hole in the floor beneath the foot pedals and a huge circular compass mounted on the steering column. The father developed gangrene in one of his legs and had to have it amputated. Sadly he died soon afterwards, whereupon his son bid farwell to the Anglican church and joined a weird, manipulative cult called The Emin. I didn't hear from him again after that.)

It rained the whole weekend - as it tends to do on camping trips -  and we spent much of the time in the tent reading newsapapers from cover to cover and fantasising about the girls at the other end of the field who amused themselves by parading around in wet T-shirts and giggling constantly. But the big highlight was the food we bought from the nearby Spar shop: boil in a bag Vesta curry and rice! I'd never eaten curry before, and this first humble experience of it sparked a lifelong craving. I suppose, were I to taste the synthetic Vesta version now - if indeed it still exists - it wouldn't pass muster. But then - we were ravenous young boys, remember - it tasted like the very ambrosia of the gods. (A quick check on the Internet has just revealed a plethora of comments on the Vesta curry, the concensus being 'truly disgusting'!)

Needless to say, this liking for processed, packaged food was merely a transient novelty, and soon gave way to a more serious and subtle appreciation of the taste, texture and terroir of nourriture. (It's appropriate I lapse pretentiously into French here, for my adolescent self was now undergoing a massive transformation. Juicy snippets of French, German and Latin kept slipping into my everyday speech - probably in a vain and laughable attempt to impress girls - and I fell into the habit of self-indulgently scattering names like Verlaine or Baudelaire or the Marquis de Sade into my one-sided conversations at the chute of a chapeau. Oh oui, la honte! Un tel jeune homme sans plumes, sans expérience!)

A Passion For Food: Christmas (2)

In my experience, clever food is not appreciated at Christmas. It makes the little ones cry and the old ones nervous. JANE GRIGSON

The one exception to the gloom and claustrophobia that settled on our family home - like mould on Mozzarella cheese - was Christmas. Then we did let our hair down slightly - insofar as Methodists ever let their hair down. The catalyst for this sudden explosion of fun and jollity was Auntie Kit, my father's unmarried sister: the pig breeder, chicken fancier and mushroom picker of yesterday's post. She was my favourite aunt (well, I only had two, and the other one I had little to do with), and she had a soft spot for me as well. In the winter months she used to sit open-legged in front of a roaring fire with her voluminous bloomers on full display.Sometimes she'd drop off to sleep in this position then wake with a snort to find her stockings had been singed. Over the course of my regular visits (regular because she owned a fuzzy-screened black-and-white TV and my parents did not), she introduced me to the delights of sloe gin, carrot whisky, giant yorkshire puddings, and bread and dripping. Most of what she cooked in her tiny rustic kitchen involved the heavy use of bubbling pork fat. But it was at Christmas she really came into her own.

At Auntie Kit's legendary parties, cider was drunk and games were played. We pinned the tail on the donkey, tossed balloons into buckets, passed the parcel. There were puzzles, conundrums, and other word games - all of which I tended to win, as most of the other participants were elderly relations with failing memories or inbred cousins somewhat lacking in the IQ department. Then there was the food. For Christmas dinner we'd have turkey with all the trimmings: roasted vegetables, two kinds of stuffing (sage and forcemeat), bread sauce, cranberry sauce, the most delicious gravy. Not forgetting, of course, the brussel sprouts - problematic vegetables for some, but I found their pungent aroma and bitter taste completely irresistible. There was sherry before and wine during the meal - the one time of  year when alcohol was allowed. And in the afternoon, after we'd tired of reading out poems, taking turns on the piano, giggling at mad Uncle Frank who'd fallen asleep with his mouth open, and unwrapping the little extra presents at the bottom of the tree, there was the Christmas tea to look forward to: cold ham and tongue, pork pie, pickles, trifle, jelly, blancmange.

Those days now seem long ago. It was a time of greater innocence, certainly. A time when people made their own fun out of very little.Yet inbetween these oases of happiness, dark clouds permanently lingered over the country fields of my childhood, clouds which would not completely disperse until I reached adolescence and was mature enough to make a bid for my own personal freedom. And food played a part in all this, as it does in so many aspects of our lives ...

A Passion For Food: Childhood (1)

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF

I've mentioned food in passing on this blog, and have occasionally written some brief posts on the subject. But I don't think I've ever stressed how passionately interested I am in cookery and in different food cultures around the world. I'm not really sure how this interest came about but, like many things, I suspect it may have its origins in childhood.

 As was the case with most traditional English country families in the 1950s and 60s, the food on our table was simple, wholesome, unvaried and home-sourced. What wasn't home-grown was usually bartered within the local village community. My unmarried aunt who lived across the field kept pigs and chickens. So we had a constant supply of fresh eggs and always had a stock of both the mentionable and the unmentionable parts of a pig in the freezer. The field itself, which we called the 'croft', yielded an abundant crop of mushrooms in the autumn. Unpasteurised milk came from my father's small herd of Jerseys; and peas, beans, raspberries and strawberries from my mother's vegetable garden.

The only serious weekly expense was the the joint of beef which took pride of place on our dining table each Sunday. My father made a big ritual out of carving it. He'd take an age over sharpening the knife and judging the best angle of attack. Finally the knife would plunge in, and he'd laboriously question each member of the family in turn. Do you want a little slice of the outside? (I never did - it wasn't exactly burnt, but it was always rather dry and well-done.) Do you want a little bit of fat? You know it's good for you! (Again I always declined, though later I grew to love the fat on meat.) In fact I often wouldn't eat anything at all those formal Sunday lunchtimes, repressed as I was, and tense as I felt the atmosphere to be. The steaming vegetables seemed to exude the stultifying, musty odour of the chapel we'd just left - and, anyway, they'd been overcooked almost to extinction, as was the custom in those days.

I existed on a diet of salads, warmed-up stews, fried eggs and cheese sandwiches. (Although I didn't think about it at the time, this was very healthy - far healthier than the burger, chips and coke diet of so many kids now.) If I did fancy something sweet - though I preferred savoury to sweet - there were tins of my mother's home-made cakes and biscuits in the pantry. I was stick-thin. If I expelled the air from the bottom of my lungs with my diaphragm, I swear my stomach would almost hit my backbone. But most of my friends were healthily slim too. These were the days when children roamed the countryside in perfect freedom, cycled the lanes, swam and fished in the old gravel pit lakes, made dens in the woods - expending a whole lot more energy than sitting in front of TVs and computers.

Quite honestly I didn't think very much about food then. It was just fuel, and it was also associated negatively in my mind with rather tense and awkward family mealtimes. But all that was to change ...