Before making tomato sauce to preserve for the winter months ahead from 3 kilos of the Italian plum variety grown by friends we stayed with down in Lot-et-Garonne last week, I searched for a recipe in Elizabeth David's Italian Food written in 1954. As the pages flicked past, my eyes fell upon the following, which I repeat here with much respect to my teacher/cook;

"It will be seen that this dish is very different from the slice of nondescript  meat encased in a sodden jacket of bread and blotting paper and fried in synthetic lard which so frequently masquerades as a Milanese cutlet in this (Britain) country."

Wonderful. She told it like it was and so often, still is. I feel she needs to be put firmly before any budding cook, any lover of food, any European traveller who has not had the chance to read her work and find what an inspiration she was.
 

Here above, a couple of litres of really good tasty tomato sauce made with about 3 kilos of peeled tomatoes, several garlic cloves, which were added to sweated out & nicely softened chopped onions, a bunch of small basil leaves; the last on our balcony's plant, some origano, some thyme, some rough old sea salt from somewhere around this beautiful country's coast and some freshly ground pepper. Once that was cooked and tasting good it was given a quick blitz while I thought how best to proceed.

The problem was, that having got home from Périgord late Friday I went the following morning to a local agriculteur's business, which is like a cross between a small garden centre, an old fashioned ironmongers and in spring somewhere to collect the new season's hen chicks, to buy a rotavator,  answer an advert for one to hire, to find gardening services or a small flat to rent for a month in summer on the Côte d'Azur and somewhere to have the lawnmower repaired. There I found the shutters down and a small notice advising that, due to a death in the family; the matriarch at 95, the business was shut, I assumed, for a period of mourning.

So where else would I buy 'capsules' for my Le Parfait jars, donated for the job? There was nowhere else. Sunday morning and the business still shut I ventured to a few local supermarkets that open until midday only... sensible country France, and practical too but none had what I needed.

My trusty neighbour, he of the wisteria, didn't use that system and so now the sauce sits, chilling at the bottom of the 'frigidaire' until Friday morning next which is the earliest I can revisit this little problem.

Bugger

Wild Swimming?

Lake Days...

August lakeside late afternoon beach -
almost forgotten by the moving lowering sun -
the pebbles warm, for now;
golden forms of late day swimmers.
The tiny white peach-likes exposed for me; are quickly gone.

Lapping edge pebbles move once more,
the lake changing
shape, changing colour.

The heat subsides; the evening beckons
as the sun moving
catches patches and people part; for now.

#
The girls lie at the water's edge, half in half out
of the warm cooling lake, tossing the fine pebbles
lost in child dreams.

They conspire, giggling
in first friendly intimacy; none allowed in,
not the elderly couple stumbling
along the shingle shore - long past intimacy.
They pass; the lost girls giggle more hidden in their game.

Just off; a man swims, a strong crawl
easy breathing stroke past the buoys
and back again.

The lapping water here
crashes, smashes,
against the harbour bar wall.


#

Today; glass like grey but green once in,
and warm as my arms break through the fresh expanse.
Cooler lower and clear down to stones,
peeking up from sandy patches.
The tiny perch dart away from threat in the lower silence.

Mid-August heatwave afternoon beach; pebbled,
and I'm sweating so refresh in warm lake calm and shiny top flat,
but bubbled froth-like as it laps around my shoulders.

My hands strike through, straight and turn,
and brown skinned arms break through the green lighted water
as it quietly laps about me.

10 minutes -

I circle once and see the drift...
I pull forward,
the fresh soft water, unsalted, pulls me down.
I wouldn't float.

The noises of playthings nearby, and cries of babies...

15 minutes and I'm glad.
Still strike forward but turn larger circles of fresh once wild,
once mountain stream,
now valley torrent plunged deep
and rising years later.

20 minutes and I smile,
that satisfaction mounts;
what have I gained?

Pleasure.
Freedom; momentarily.

Poem for a former lover...

furiously flapping flags
in wild windy weather,
worn outside/ inside
late lunch laughing lads leering longingly at leggy lovely,
louching her brothel stew.
Interruptions; mobiles manipulating the mood...
bottles débouched and corks coming,
the sound of wine escaping captivity amongst the unintelligible gabbles;
French flung frantically in between the chairs and the old cuir walls...

And you think you'd love this ?

On the London Underground the following day...

I sit upon the Tube train carrying me back to the airport and wonder from where the outburst of the previous evening came... I said, "one word from you and they do as they like..."

Yes, it was a criticism but not meant harshly, but one borne from watching over so many years as my younger sister battles with her kids who do not listen or obey until she feels she cannot keep on and on and on at them, and she gives up, and they have won. And they know it. And they tell her.

She being much younger than me, won't remember the way our bullying father disciplined his young family with his hand and not his words. She being a girl wasn't hit.

Our sister was not either, but I being the older and a boy received his pent up violence in the only way he knew; him having spent six years, but some years earlier, in the most violent world imaginable. His Victorian father probably did the same.

And having said those words I let open the torrent of self doubt... and they still do as they like.

Full Fathom Five thy Father lies

Gull above the glinting seas of England

Full fathom five thy father lies;
     Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
    Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange:
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.
                             Ding-dong!
Hark!  now I hear them,
                             Ding-dong, bell!


William Shakespeare
From THE TEMPEST

Probably the first Shakespeare I was taught and which I learnt;
posted this day, 23rd April Shakespeare's 448th birthday and St George's Day, patron saint of England.
England, my England.