ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Did my Christmas bit last Wednesday – enjoyed an afternoon hanging out in beautiful big Earle Clarke House

with Joyce and Peter, who every year host a gathering of 70-100 elves who come and go throughout the day bringing food and packing it into giant hampers for needy families in the area. This year the Salvation Army was seeking to provide some 1300 hampers in all, which come from local organisations and community groups as well as more informal groups like this one.

When I left, the turkey (and therefore hamper) count was a record-breaking 65; after I left the tally rose to an amazing 76. Not bad for word of mouth.

It’s a fiendishly simple idea: you just invite everyone you know, ask them to bring what they wish from the list – or raise cash donations to buy what’s needed – and then feed and water them while they work, and somehow it all comes together. It helps that Joyce is supremely well-organised and understands the power of good sign-posting.

She also makes a gorgeous Christmas cake, terrific pea soup and great eggnog,

and cranberry punch

for her grateful workers.

Joyce reports that three of the hampers went to the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder Community Circle’s “Moms Mentoring Moms,” which provides support services to mothers trying to raise families where addiction has been a problem. The other 73 hampers went to the Salvation Army, along with cases of extra carrots, brussels sprouts and potatoes. She says that it took seven burly Salvation Army volunteers and two big trucks to collect it all.

The company which provides my email has also decided to change my surname. So maybe you can understand why I dislike being in North America in general, and why I have a special hate on for the Beach Boys?

It is maybe not as specific and passionate a hatred as I have for Canada Post, that government agency which has the bare-faced cheek to charge tax when it sells us stamps, and who took my money for holding my mail and then sent a selection of it back to Italy. So now I can choose to enjoy playing a complicated long-distance game of hide and seek in Italian with Poste Italiane during the Christmas rush.

However. I did have an outstanding meal in London before I left, at La Trompette. Here’s the evidence:

A starter of mixed leaves – endive of two colours and rocket – with roquefort, walnuts and poached quince:

Followed by an exquisite piece of sea-bream, crunchy and melting, on a bed of pureed potatoes with a darling lettuce heart and perfectly roasted parsnips for company, in a chicken jus with capers.

We would not dare to call this delicious morsel Pineapple Fluff, but superficially, and passion fruit aside, the resemblance was striking…

And on my first visit to an Italian grocery in Vancouver, which shall remain nameless for the moment, I was able to spot my first instance of cheese fraud. They had vac-packed Grana Padano and were selling it as Parmigiano-Reggiano; you can tell by the markings on the rind, which are diamond-shaped for Grana, whereas Parmigiano-Reggiano simply has its name spelled out together with the production date (which makes it annoying not to get a specific answer when I asked the seller how old their Parmigiano-Reggiano was: basically you are looking for something in the 24-36 month range, but all she could tell me was the piece in my hand would be between 2 and 4 years… since the producers will have charged the wholesaler more for a 36 month wheel than for a 24, it does matter to me the consumer which I am buying).

Grana is a cheaper, industrial version of Parmigiano-Reggiano, so it is more than cheeky to try to pass it off as its higher-priced cousin. I told the clerk at the cheese counter that the cheese had been mislabelled; she looked confused but gamely started filling a basket to get the offending merchandise off the display. But when I looked again, most of it was still there. I will hold judgement and whistle-blowing until I have a chance to check them out again. I greatly fear that my year’s experience has only served to make me potentially unwelcome everywhere I go.

Even the horses wear tartan.

And you must always, always, watch where you step.

And the plants are so large they get their own right of way.

And the Scots are so hardy they take their baths outside.

Well. Beyond all that, the writing has gone well this week, but what I’ve been constantly enjoying is all the reading.

Here’s a great discovery, thanks to Sian who found it in The Faber book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry: Elma Mitchell, who begins “Thoughts after Ruskin” this way:

Women reminded him of lilies and roses.
Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,
– All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens…

And from the same anthology, I enjoyed “Chinese Poem” from Iain Crichton Smith, as I too have been wondering

When shall I see the city again,
its high towers and insurance offices,
its glare of unprincipled glass?

Rather too soon I am sure. And once I’m there perhaps I will be eating some of George MacBeth‘s material from “An Ode to English Food”:

…Fresh, tender and unbelievable English
duck. Such

luscious morsels of you! Heap high the
groaning platter with pink fillets, suckling pig and
thick gammon, celestial chef. Be generous with the
crackling. Let your hand slip with the gravy trough,
dispensing plenty. Yes, gravy, I give you your due,
too. O savoury and delightsome gravy, toothsome
over

the soft white backs of my English potatoes,
fragrant with steam. Brave King Edwards, rough-
backed in your dry scrubbed excellence, or with
butter, salty.

And another Scottish treasure I’ll be looking for is W.S. Graham, who died in 1986 but whose Nightfishing (1955) still gets hailed as a model of writing about the fishing life. He writes well about the cold, too, in “Malcom Mooney’s Land” which I read in hopeful anticipation of prairie blizzards (experienced from a warm and safe observation point) in my future…

From wherever it is I urge these words
To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle
of silence cranes to watch. Footprint on foot
Print, word on word, and each on a fool’s errand.
…
From the rimed bag of sleep, Wednesday,
My words crackle in the early air.
Thistles of ice about my chin.
My dreams, my breath a ruff of crystals.
the new ice falls from canvas walls.

Just taking a last look round Edinburgh before I vanish back down south on Saturday and way back west on Tuesday. The city is, as you might expect, full of Christmas buzz, although the bus system is making me cranky and is a sterling example of the evils of privatisation. Here’s a challenge to all: in what other major city on the planet can you find multiple bus companies running separate services along many of the same routes, where the companies do not accept one another’s day passes, and where the bus drivers can only sell you day passes that work on that service? The maps (like those of Parma) are a confusing if colourful spaghetti-like maze and I suppose that the colourblind bus riders of Scotland have all long since given up and moved away. Or bought cars.

The main attractions for me today were to see the Joan Eardley exhibition I’d been hearing about, and to see what was up at the ethical Christmas fair on Princes Street. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and ever so occasionally, there’s a little smack of mist.

In a scene which I am sure is distressingly familiar to Vista users everywhere I have sat in a Wifi cafe for the past 25 minutes watching my laptop’s battery life plummet even as the Network and Sharing Center’s evil icons show their red x and endlessly spinning circle while the Internet icon remains grey and soulless. Anyone still on XP thinking of taking the plunge… Don’t Do It. I will be reverting to XP as soon as I’m able. Let some other sucker live through the endless bugs in this system.

Two weeks of reading and feeding, writing, walking, thinking, talking. Scottish weather has not been all bad. A little rain, some wind, enough blue sky. Not freezing, for the most part, though a frost on the grass today and a clear chill on Princes Street as I wander around Edinburgh. Tea has helped, and the odd evening dram. Out to a movie last weekend: Into the Wild, a good enough diversion for the cabin-fevered.

“Applause whilst thou livest, serveth to make thee that fair mark against which envy and malice direct their arrows, and when thou art wounded, all eyes are turned towards thee (like the sun, which is most gazed on in an eclipse), not for pity or praise, but detraction.” — William Drummond, A Cypress Grove (1623)

I don’t know, is that supposed to make us feel better or worse about not getting acclaim in our lifetime?

Other reading I’ve done includes: Auden, Larkin, Hughes; Sean O’Brien, Colette Bryce, Susan Tichy, Sandra McPherson, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Thomas Lux. Wandered into a little prose as well, the Drummond above, also Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking.

And had a lovely trip to the Rosslyn Chapel, which I was for some reason slightly shocked to learn Dan Brown never visited, though they are certainly awash with visitors now, so at least the chapel is reaping some of the benefits which it can put into its restoration fund. It seems they have some bad problems with damp getting inside the stonework, caused by some well intentioned restoration work in the 1950s. Anyway it’s an amazing place and I’m happy to have had the chance to see it.

An interim posting while I stop briefly in London en route to Scotland… Have now left Parma after a week of turmoil and transition.

Yesterday was tiring. I had a couple more parcels to send, one 10kg and the other 5kg. I put the larger one in my suitcase and trundled heavily off with the smaller one perched on top, which occasionally flung itself off into the road from the sheer joy of cobblestones. I got to my destination, the post office on Tommasini, where I took my place in line and after a little wait was told that they were out of the forms to send things superficie, and that it would cost 95 euros to send the smaller package by the much speedier method dictated by the forms they did have.

So off I trundled to the main post office where I took a number, joined a queue and waited my turn. Only to find that they too were out of superficie forms.

Off I trundled to the third post office on via Verdi, where I joined a queue, waited my turn… and they had the forms! So that was that.

I found some tasty treats for lunch, washed them down with a little lingering Barolo (from dear Michele Chiarlo) and commenced packing the giant suitcase. Alas, it was too heavy for my friends at Ryanair, so I decanted a bag of surplus and set off for the only other post office open in the afternoon, way on the other side of town, which I very much hoped could supply me with both a box and a superficie form. And indeed it was so.

Meanwhile, my phone had died and I expended some time and effort cruising Nokia support forums for a diagnosis. Which was no answer at all once I realised that in my zeal for postal services the receipt I would need in order to get anything fixed under warranty was probably in a box of paperwork winging its way to Canada.

So I enter the communications void: no phone, no internet for the next month. I’m sure I’ll be sneaking away to the library from time to time, but if things go quiet here in the caff, don’t be alarmed.

I had, over the previous couple of days, discovered that for reasons I have either forgotten or never intended, I’d booked my travel to Edinburgh for Saturday instead of Sunday, when the residency actually begins. Which meant either changing the el cheapo ticket (which was not all that cheap, at least not in dollars) or spending about the same on overnight accommodations. But an emergency call to Scottish cousins yielded happy results and I’m one less problem to solve and looking forward to minor family reunion tomorrow afternoon.

This morning was just a quiet time of packing and discarding. I got myself a taxi to the airport when the driver asked if I knew there was a sciopero. I did, I said, my Italian skills growing ever more marginal, but I can still fly to London, no? He wasn’t sure, he said, as it affected trains and planes. Perfect. Just what I wanted to hear, having cleared out of my apartment, left the keys behind, arranged travel and accoms for the following day.

But he pressed on to the airport where all was, thankfully, as usual, and I stepped up to the check-in. The attendant looked distressed: it’s over weight! I know, I said, the tyranny of Ryanair’s 15kg limit never more acute than to someone leaving town after a year. She was as generous as she could be, but I had to cough up a few more euros before I could collect my boarding pass. Then I discovered (with the help of the security guys) that I still had the forbici that I’d taken to the post office yesterday stuck in a side pocket of my purse. And my belt and boots set off the alarms. And I’d forgotten to take the plastic bag of liquids out of the other bag. And I nearly left my laptop behind. But other than that… a piece of cake!

So, after a mercifully uneventful flight, landing and trip across London, I am packing and re-packing with post-Bonfire Night fireworks crackling around the neighbourhood, and there’s still too damned much stuff to take for a month in the castle. But I will get there. Ciao for now!