Posts by daleaway
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There's a specially sharp nostalgia pang for food you know you'll never taste again.
I still recall the perfect Scotch eggs from the downstairs snack bar of James Smith's in Wellington in the 1960s. (The little one outside the haberdashery notions department - belt buckles and so forth. ) So crisp outside, so melting within and with apple in them too. Ruined all other Scotch eggs for me for life. The ones sold in supermarkets are truly incompetent. Bad gristly meat, and oversalted. Ugh.
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Here ya go:
http://www.sweetideas.co.nz/Resource+Centre/The+Pavlova.htmlHelen Leach has discovered the New Zealand origins of Anzac Biscuits as well. We'll let the Aussies have Lamingtons, and they can keep Russell Crowe as well.
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I'll threaten him with worse than that - I'll come back next year and comment some more. And there'll probably be fewer opinions than reminiscences next year as well!
Thanks to the Head Boy and all the Chalk Monitors for keeping the class ruly this year. May you all have a blessed Christmas - that's what it's there for.
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There's never a camera ready when you need it, is there?
Anyone tasked with buying Christmas presents for young girls might like to muse on this:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/ehrenreich -
It's the out-of-kilter Christmases you remember.
One Christmas in Fiji.
I'm in my late teens, travelling alone and staying with a local family in a rural area. Christmas dinner is big black mud crabs, obtained live the day before and tied to the doorhandle with a piece of string. They scrabble against the door all night. They're right next to my sleeping area and make me too nervous to sleep. Come lunch time, all I want to eat is dalo and daruka (vegetables), but I choke down a piece of crab to be polite. I feel a long way from home.Four Christmases in Amsterdam.
The Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas on December 5, so Christmas Day is a family, religious occasion. The English and American ex-pats go home for Christmas, but the Far-Flung Ex-Pats must turn to each other for Christmas Day company.Year 1. The dear old Minister of the English Reform Church in the Begijnhof invites us to Christmas dinner. The church is staffed from the Church of Scotland so we have a traditional Presbyterian Christmas at the Manse. Quite jolly, with freesias to harbinge spring.
Year 2. Fred and Marcia, newlyweds, invite us. A long journey through snow. Marcia's inexperience in the kitchen shows, as she runs out of food and has to open a tin. Fred spends the whole time talking about his new purchases. Six months later he is done for embezzlement.
Year 3. My sister arrives from London with her latest boyfriend, staying in the attic storage space of our third floor, walk up, one-room flat, loo on the landing and no bathroom. We cobble together a New Zealand style Christmas dinner with no oven, just three gas rings. Boyfriend gives us all holy medals for Christmas. When he has gone back to Ireland, I set mine free in a bus shelter.
Year 4. Chic and Ans, the West Indian musician and German scientist odd couple, join us for a hot curry lunch. Those gas rings again. A rather noisy time is had by all. Chic died last year. Ans is long vanished.
FF to this year. We're hosting again, and what do you know, our new abode (a work in progress) has no working oven. Back to the gas rings. The new kitchen (French Provincial, costing a dauphin's ransom) is due to arrive in the third week in January. So it's an informal Kiwi pot luck buffet with crowds of bickering rellies, on home turf. We're looking forward to the shambles.
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Ten days before Christmas, and you want women to do MORE voluntary work?
Are you MAD????
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One of the quiet delights of getting more venerable - oh all right, old - is the increasing ease with which one "lives with doubt", as you paraphrased Bertie Russell. Or to move from Bertie to Gertie (and Alice B), to stop looking for the answer and instead mumble "What was the question?" It's all joy.
Speaking of games, Danielle, with the cicadas calling, is it time the ladies pressed our cricket whites and formed a PAS Women's XI?
Who else is ready to whip off some bails?
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I wonder what people believe is in this " insecticide".
BTK, the spray ingredient, is one of the few insecticides used by organic farmers - it's a bacteria that needs to be activated by insects' alkaline gut. Humans can't ingest it, our stomach acids don't permit it. Neither can animals.
So unless the carrying medium was not water+wetting agent, what is it exactly that people are reacting to? (Apart from neurosis and a heightened need to star in their own personal drama?) I'm no being entirely dismissive, I'd really like to know.
Here's what Canada thinks:
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/cps-spc/pest/pestprod/btk_e.html#skipnav
and
http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/pesticide/btkfacts.shtml -
Molesworth Street brings back memories. We had given this particular march a miss because it was the night of Chas and Di Wales's wedding and we were having an alternative wedding reception for them on "Last Days of Empire " theme (ladies a salver; dress code: posh).
Colour TV in the sitting room for the party and the wedding broadcast. B&W TV in the supper room for the late news, so that the latecomers who had arrived from the Tour protest could see themselves running every which way in the Molesworth Street affray.
I was dressed as Britannia with toasting fork trident. Witi Ihimaera and his wife came as ambassadors dressed to the nines for a Buck House garden party - little did we think that that was prophetic!
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No, Kath and Kim think "pacific" is an Australianism - maybe we gave it to them, or maybe it's just transnational Basic Bogan.
"Apostrophe Catastrophe" was the title of a mystery serial I wrote online with a Canadian co-author around 1999, just for a lark - someone gave it its own webpage and someone else wrote a fussy book with the same title some years afterwards.
Not wishing to be too negative, I'll also throw my vote behind "sub prime". It just seems to mean anything below par, dodgy or all-round stupid. Like lending to people with insufficient funds.