Soup for Miracles

My cousin Angus was a pyromaniac before he could walk. Not an arsonist, let's just get that straight. He loved, respected and was enraptured by fire. Not just the flames, but the whole religious ritual. Before the NS's abdication, we lived in Cumbria in a house on a cliff with a fireplace that all the children could stand up in together. Every Christmas Eve, the dads bundled us overexcited kids into wellies and waterproofs and marched us through the gloaming over the field with the Roman remains, scrambled us down the brows and onto the beach to womble* for the Christmas Log.

This huge lump of tree was then hauled back up the cliff using old rope, chains and as much bot-power as social services would let them get away with. Whining was verboten, especially with Santa's Fairies on constant lookout for places to leave the apocryphal lump of coal. The Northern Socialist would then channel his inner Thoreau and build the fire using the Guardian, twigs, the scantest bit of coal and finally, the Christmas Log. This would then burn for about three days, sparking and whistling. Strange colours would flame out of it, whooshing among the crannies and no doubt getting us kids all well off our tits on chemical fumes. No matter. While the grown ups were in another room shrieking to Morcambe and Wise, we would lie in the dark, rapt on the hearthrug, Christmas lights twinkling, and make last-minute bargains with Santa.

Angus always came the closest to getting a coal-stuffed stocking. He hated leaving the fire, and would push Santa's fairies to the limits of patience dragging his feet in protest at the unfairness of leaving his place of worship by the hearth. In the morning, he was always first downstairs, loudly lisping tales of still-burning miracles to bedrooms flurried with wrapping paper and spent stockings.

When I was at University, he came to stay with me for a night in my terraced hovel. I assumed at fifteen, he'd be keen to enjoy cheap unsupervised booze. Instead, I went to the pub and he stayed behind, cleaned out the chimney in my dank little room and built me a crackling, beautiful fire.

Seven long years ago, he married a wonderful girl. They waited to have a baby. And waited. Through all the cousins' babies, he kept the fires burning. He taught my son and nephews how to use a chainsaw and took them on tractor rides and always smiled. It must have been very hard for them - I cannot think of two people more suited to parenthood. Last month, at long last, they had a son. Many tears of joy were shed, many glasses raised, many fires lit.

Today they came for lunch and I met a bonny happy baby. His parents beamed non-stop. While Angus inspected the chimneys, I made them a firey soup.

Angus's Soup
Fry onions and garlic in the time-honoured way. Add a teaspoon each of cumin and smoked paprika. Chuck in several handfuls of red lentils, add two cartons of tomato passata and top up with (sorry Antonio) vegetable stock. Simmer while you hoist a month-old baby onto your shoulder and breathe in the smell of skin and wonder. When the lentils are tender (about 40 minutes) serve with rustic bread and eat with one hand, patting the sleeping baby with the other. Feeds vegetarians and carnivores alike.

*"..making good use of the things that we find, things that the everyday folk leave behind.." For more of this click here.

A Little Tea, A Little Chat

My Granny could still do the splits into her seventies. When I was small, she told me she'd been a Bluebell dancer and that she had killed lions. But then she also told me I was on safari in Africa when I was quite clearly sitting in a cardboard box in the North of England. She had a fabulous tea set which I coveted. She promised me that it would be mine when she died. It was twined with pale roses and was so translucent you could see your stout little seven year old hand through it. She made a wonderful deal of tea, peopling the table with invisible guests - Dickon from The Secret Garden, Marlene Dietrich, Big Ears. The only rule was that you could never be silent and afterwards you had to brush her hair while she swooned in pleasure, sucking forbidden fruity boiled sweets. In the 1970s, the Northern Socialist uprooted our family and fled the UK to avoid living under a Thatcher government. Sadly I never saw my Granny or the tea set again.

Many years later someone kindly gave  me a tea set which pretty much matched my memories of Granny's one. I love using it, but do so all too infrequently. This morning, I woke to a house ringing with the shrieks of Rose's four birthday sleepover chums. I set the breakfast table with my rosy tea set and assorted sugary and chocolatey nonsense. The girls trooped in and Rose excused my oddness, muttering "My mum thinks she lives in the 1930s." They sat down and tucked in, while in the background on Radio One, Carrie the Sports Announcer announced her pregnancy.

Hissing whispers. "Carrie's pregnant." "No." "But she's just come back from honeymoon." "Yes, but I think she got married last year and only just went on honeymoon now." "Weird. Why would you do that?" Silence while they all counted to nine several times. "Well. She'll have to stop working now."

Members of the Breakfast Womens' Institute - you think I live in the 1930s?

A Treat for an Autumn Evening

Doesn't she look like a sweetie?

Apparently she'd drink you under the table then make you cry.

I want to be her when I grow up.

Molly Keane (1905 – 1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright. She loved booze, hunting and her dogs. She was a great chum of Elizabeth Bowen, her co-chronicler of the decline of the Anglo-Irish stately home and way of life. Her work, in case this jewel of a writer has escaped your notice, falls pretty much into two separate time periods, separated by almost forty years. The first lot is pretty good if you fancy whiling away a few hours in a mannered pre-War drawing room from a time that died. The second lot of books are the real stunners.

Molly's adolescence was marked and profoundly affected by the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent Black and Tan war, spelling the end of the iron ruling by the Anglo-Irish upper classes and the final death throes of that way of life. Her mother was remote and her father was weak - her unhappy childhood is revisited over and over again in both her early and later novels, which are peopled with wonderful characters who will stay with you long after the last page. She takes no prisoners - if you can't hunt and don't love horses, you have no place in her world. Tough, unsentimental and absolutely certain that drinkies and a dog to hand cure most ills. In this world of victims and blame culture, she renders me nostalgic for a period I never knew.

Her early career, in the 1930s and 40s was written under the pseudenoym MJ Farrell, a name she spied on a pub hacking home from a hunt one afternoon. To her sort, writing was hideously declasse, so her books and plays were kept a secret from the huntin' shootin' and fishin' types she lived among. Her plays even ran in the West End. She suddenly stopped writing in 1946 - partly because her husband, Bobby, the love of her life and father of her two young daughters, died suddenly and tragically at the age of 37; and partly because the crisis in the economy caused the sources of income from the Empire to dry up to almost nothing, spelling the end of that peculiarly upper class way of life. The huge houses fell into ruin over the ensuing decades, wardrobes and stables grew empty and the lower orders no longer knew their places.

For almost forty years, she kept her head down and her nose clean, then suddenly, dripping wickedness and a rapier wit, Good Behaviour appeared in 1981. There are many of us who think she deserved the Booker prize for it that year. This was followed by Time After Time (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988). These books are, bluntly, bleeding brilliant. The characters are observed with a heady cocktail of spite and intelligence. They are dark, often hopeless, always amusing. This is what happened to those glamorous people after the war. Lack of money, crippling snobbery, equestrian obsession and huge albatrosses of house around their increasingly wrinkly necks. Uppity servants, clouds of dogs to feed, tarnishing silver and fading albums. Beautifully observed and possibly the best accompaniment to a crackling fire on an autumn day. Make yourself a plate of Gentlemans Relish* sandwiches, pot of china tea, lock the door and just wallow in her biting prose and meticulous observation of human foibles.

She was a neighbour of the family of a friend of mine and an abiding regret is that I never managed to extricate myself from London to make the trip to Waterford to meet her. When I eventually made a visit, several years after her death, I mentioned this regret to my host. A retired senior British Army officer, he was a seriously tough old guy. He said, 'yes, I know you were keen on her books and I'm glad we never had to invite her over to meet you. She was utterly bloody terrifying.'

*Bit of an acquired taste - I think anchovy is the key ingredient - very salty, just use a scrape.

In which I become golf-mad for 45 minutes

It's half term here and Rose (who will be 11 tomorrow. Gulp) is at hockey camp for three days. Camp implies some lovely bosky New-England site, all Abercrombie-type counsellors and perfect-smile kids with rosy cheeks and the promise of toasted marshmallows later on in the cabin. In fact, she just goes between 10 and 4 every day, and it happens in a sports place. (I'm not sure what the exact term is for this since I think sports is bollocks and am in daily terror of being found out by my sporty bots.) It has a sports hall and an outside bit with astroturf and several big fields with lines all over them. Everyone wears a tracksuit of some man-made stuff and you have to check in at a window where I suspect they also dispense steroids and new passports for Chinese table tennis players. Anyway, Rose loves it and has a new mouth guard and a special T-shirt and several new bruises.

After we dropped her off, Freddie and I drove to the beach to walk the dog and buy dreadful coffee in the sort of plastic cup that pops off its own lid before depositing the boiling hot contents all over you. I was dabbing elegantly at my crotch with some napkins when he asked if we could have a go on the Crazy Golf course by the esplanade. I have long been enchanted by this place - it is exactly the sort of thing I imagine rockabillies and mods taking their sweethearts to before banging hell out of each other with chains. It is slightly seedy, very run down and, compared to anything else we've done this week, cheap as chips.

It was also knock-your-socks-off good fun. On a sunny windy day, knowing we should be doing nothing else until 4 o'clock, we decided to do every single hole. Some were easy, some fiendishly hard, involving tunnels, water features, hills. I reckon it was built in the forties, with the primary paint on each hole redone every winter when it's closed. It was pretty packed, all things considered, with players of all ages and degrees of sobriety. We had an absolute blast, laughed our heads off and argued the score with passion and increasing competitiveness. I let him win.

I have come home to a kitchen full of a neighbour's rhubarb (crumble, compote), grapes (a handful with a sharp old cheddar) and quinces (arrange winsomely in a cracked old bowl til they go brown then throw them away - seriously, have you ever read a recipe for quince jam? You need a PhD). Rose has asked for an Indian takeaway and thinks that she might like have done crazy golf for her birthday. I have already paid a king's ransome for a party in which ten little girls are covered with gold leaf and studded with diamonds make a necklace each. Do you think I should cancel? They might prefer crazy golf and coffee scalding instead.

Sunday Sonnet*

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands

Another silly summer job was being a torch lady (nope, not belting out Gloria Gaynor in drag)  - a lovely old-fashioned role, showing people to their seats in a cinema. I saw Hannah and her Sisters about 150 times that summer, and was word perfect. Not quite so enraptured with Karate Kid II; then I passed the time accidentally landing snogging couples in the full searchlight of my little torch. Anyway, I thought that the bookshop scene and subsequent reading of ee cummings was the most romantic thing I had ever seen in 19 years. Gorgeous film, gorgeous poem.

*Am assuming you're over this by now

Smashing Pumpkin Risotto

A few weeks ago I shamelessly blagged my way into was lucky enough to be invited to a dinner party at one of the bot's wee chums whose father is a chef with a Michelin background. We had seven breathtakingly delicious courses, including scallops 'flown in by Rick Stein's people' and the most delicious pumpkin risotto I have even been introduced to. The chef is a delightful fireball of Spanish and Italian parentage, and his years of cooking for premier footballers have resulted in a spectacular four-star vocabulary. I was astounded to see a fair whack of the risotto disappear down the Colonel's neck - a solid meat-and-two-veg lad, his previous encounters with it (ugh, shudder, wet rice etc) are best forgotten. I asked Antonio exactly how he made it; pumpkin was a gift, premium Parmesan and chicken stock. "Always chicken stock. Even for da vegetarians." Pause while he sloshed more red wine into our glasses. "Eespecially for da faakin vegetarians."

So, this golden October afternoon, the bots, dog and Colonel jumped merrily to at my command. We donned adorable Gap hats and bright wellies and strolled along the river to the organic vegetable market to buy the perfect pumpkin to recreate Antonio's triumph. The dog didn't eat a single mouthful of slurry; the children skipped ahead hand in hand, leaping in delight, catching the leaves which twirled to the ground; the sun obligingly shone prettily through the oaks and glinted off the boats in the estuary.

As Antonio would say, deed we faaak. I left squabbly bots and Colonel debating TV choices - Sky Sports versus Disney, it's a constant narrative - and roared off in the car to Sainsburys, where I grabbed an intensively farmed pumpkin and whizzed home.

Here, with a little interpretation from me, is Antonio's Risotto:

Risotto cannot be hurried. You need to park yourself stoveside, glass in hand, with some chilled out music and plenty of time. I recommend a long cold vodka and tonic and JJ Cale. No telly schedule and not Golden Earring*. You know who you are.

Peel and dice a pumpkin. Heat olive oil and a knob of butter and gently cook a diced oinion until soft. Add the pumpkin and stir gently until it starts to colour. Chuck in a few handfuls of arborio rice and stir to coat in the oil. Here's where it starts to be relaxing. You will have prepared a jugful of warm stock, either because you did the right thing by last Sunday's chicken carcass, or because you have microwaved a tub of Joubere Stock or even added a cube to hot water. It depends how poncy you feel. Ladle by ladle, add the stock, SLOWLY, stirring between each ladleful until the rice has absorbed the liquid. When it starts to get sticky and dry, add the next lot. Stir constantly, enjoying the slow rythm and the thought you are following the motions of Italian mamas through the centuries. Alternatively, stir with one hand, slurping your v&t and refereeing the ongoing TV control war in the next room at the top of your voice.

Either way, eventually, you will end up with a gorgeous savoury mess of cooked (but still al dente - keep tasting to check, you don't want it to overcook) rice and tender bits of pumpkin. Add a splash of vermouth or white wine. Chuck in two handfulls of finely grated parmesan, stir till melted and serve immediately. If you can be arsed, or have somebody to seduce, hollow out the pumpkin shell and serve the risotto in it. It is an absolute show-stopper. Sprinkle prettily with parsley, sit on the TV control and enjoy.

* Hideous seventies one-hit-wonder rock band. From Holland.

Vita, Vita, Polenta-Eater

Skye Gyngell in the kitchen at Petersham Nurseries
(wearing exactly the same dress as I do to cook in)

After several years living literally in a desert, I came back to England and bought a flat in St Margarets, the badlands near Richmond-on-Thames. My sister (the Pretty One) was living across the river in Petersham, and we nipped back and forth to see each other on a little boat - whistle or shout and the man appeared in his wooden craft and saved you the bother of schlepping along the towpath and crossing Richmond Bridge. It was an expat's wet dream - lush waterside meadows, grazing cattle, beautiful dark red Georgian buildings, tiny church and thundering polo ponies.

A decade or so later, St Margarets is seriously sought-after and a few oligarchs have constructed odd chalet-style compounds but the place remains relatively untouched, even though you can be bang in the West End of London in 15 minutes.

There was a  crazy little ramshackle nursery where we (no, the green-fingered Pretty One; I kill any plant I look at) used to wander about trying to find plants for her garden. In the first panicky flush of motherhood, the criteria was simple - would it poison a baby? Her boys are now young men and Petersham Nursery has become incredibly chichi and sought after; I was fascinated to read this article in Vogue a couple of years ago. If you can't be bothered to, it basically tells how the new owners of Petersham Nurseries wanted to develop the restaurant side of the businesss and in a stroke of genius, offered the chef's gig to the beautiful, troubled and talented Skye Gyngell. The daughter of an Australian tycoon, she fought a herion addiction for twenty years, emerging recently as a clean, happily settled mother of two ready to unleash her amazing gift on a grateful, greedy world.

It is, especially in the summer, almost impossible to book a table at under four weeks notice, so famous has the restaurant become. They grow all their own vegetables and the menu is composed depending on what the hand-picked suppliers deliver at 11 am. Skye has an impeccable cooking pedigree. A self-confessed control freak, she has seduced many hard-bitten critics with her passionate cooking as well as scaring several sous-chefs shitless with her perfectionist standards.

So with few hours to spare before a London conference, I finally got around to going back there with the Pretty One and her dog. If you get a chance to visit, grab it with both hands. It's the most authentic, eccentric English experience. We missed lunch, but had tea and perfect tart, moist lemon polenta cake. Being vain and the wrong side of forty, we shared a piece, eschewing smugly the amazing saffron-coloured carrot cake studded with dark chocolate, magenta beetroot cake and perfect nursey-tea scones. Actually, the PO and I inhaled half each and the dog lying hopefully under the table never got a look-in.

The plants and flowers are stunning, and the people who work there are just delightful. They promised that the amaryllis bulb would flower red just in time for Christmas, and that the hyacinth bulbs are almost indestructable. Apparently, even I, sworn enemy of Nature, could pull off the whole Lady Chatterly something-Mellors-and-I-have-been-working-on thing.

The shop is like a huge, slightly run-down Edwardian greenhouse. Battered tables, lush displays of greenery, shabby baskets holding all manner of treasures. Things I would have snapped up if I had limitless funds: antique French mirror, shabby stone urns, huge fragile silver and glass Christmas baubly-type things. Things I would have snapped up if I had limitless legs: dark blue lace-up wellies. Their own-brand garden bits are also covetable - canvas and leather aprons, gauntlets and boot bags. Very Sackville-West.

The PO was busy sniggering her way through a story she'd been told by some well-connected neighbours of hers about an actress and some randy husbands. Unfortunately, we're all slightly deaf in our family and she had misheard 'bike' as 'dyke,' which completely changed the tale. I thought it made it heaps better. NOT very Sackville-West.