Bringing in the May

May at Bodiam Castle

I've been racking my brains over what to write about. I try to blog at least once a week. More as an exercise for myself, than for the benefit and edification of my ‘audience’. Possible topics have included ‘male nudity on screen’ (in view of the recent piece of flaccid putty that made a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Game of Thrones last week) ‘American vs British sitcoms’, ‘the issue of race’ (which will definitely be visited at some point).

But there it was, a suitable topic, twinkling away under my nose all the time: old English traditions. It’s the second May bank holiday weekend and there is rich material to be had in our recent visit to Bodiam Castle (as if I haven’t bored you enough with the photos).

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/bodiam-castle

Bodiam is said to exemplify the quintessential medieval castle. It has a moat around it, a portcullis and four towers. No one has actually lived there since the seventeenth century, but it's last private owner, Lord Curzon, bequeathed it to the National Trust in the early twentieth century and they have lovingly restored it. 
At Bodiam we learnt about ‘Bringing in the May’;  a custom from the Dark Ages when there was no Netflix and no pistachio Magnums, where life expectancy was around forty, so twenty was considered to be middle-aged! It wasn't all bad, though, once a year you got to dance around the maypole, get plastered and go into the woods with the spotty youth of your choice - presumably to identify different berries and hawthorn plants by moonlight...

Of three things you can be assured when you visit a National Trust property: 
1) Some lovely, home made cake.
2) A gift shop, selling jams, curds, plants and things with a flowery covering (diaries, soaps, garden implements). 
3) Sprightly, keen staff who know the history of the property, inside out! Some of these people dress up as historical characters and can answer any question you pose to them (although they seem a bit fuzzy on the whole Brexit debate).

I spent twenty minutes with Sir Edward Dallingridge’s ‘washerwoman’. She never came out of character and we bashed some snowy white shifts with her washing bats. She gave me a comprehensive history of the castle, talking about the role of women: past and present and the way in which the last owner of the castle - Lord Curzon M.P, was opposed to giving women the vote. She told me that there would be an exhibition on the Suffragettes, next weekend - June 4th 2016.

I was surprised to learn that some women in the Middle ages became powerful while their men were away at war (The Hundred years war). Women also had to take over traditionally male roles, in the workplace, as they did in WW2.

Financially a woman could flourish under certain circumstances. She said that there were no restrictions on how many shares/gilts a woman could own but men were only allowed one.

I used to view history as an upward line of progress, and indeed, I think that was how we were encouraged to think of it, at school,  but I now more commonly (and depressingly) view it as a wheel.

The ‘washerwoman’ had a life of hard work but had travelled to France with her employer (Dallingridge) to ensure that he had the whitest shirts. (He sounds like a bit of a show off - very found of stained glass windows).

So, going back to the ‘Bringing in the May’ talk, which we had in the ‘Great Hall’, which is now carpeted with grass. My daughters made a beeline for the ‘thrones’ so the older one was rewarded with the title and crown of May Queen.

May symbolised the end of a hard winter; where food was very scarce and they had no good methods for storing and preserving food. Where they’d been ploughing the land, doing all this hard hard physical work, fasting for Lent, then May came, bringing warmer weather, longer days and more light. It helped that we were having this talk on a brilliantly sunny day. Of course, May Day was about a reversal of social roles, where the plebs could be nobs for a day. And we plebs experienced it that day as the guide referred to us as ‘my lord and my lady’.  

So, all in all a great day out, where history nosed up against the present and there was a sobering portent for the future, with a sign on the grounds that  read, 'flood zone' and the message that in 50 years, they expected that area to be under water because of climate change!

Trying not to pass it on

As soon as my daughter was born I made a mental pact to try not to pass any body neuroses on to her. I wanted our house to be a ‘diet free’ zone where nobody talked about weight and where nobody ever said: “ooh, I've been really ‘bad’ today; I've eaten so much!”

Of course, this was slightly naive as I couldn’t control what anybody else said around her and a depressingly large number of conversations seem to centre around this issue (and here I am - writing about it again!).  But we still try to conceal any preoccupation with weight and  associated issues in our house.This leads to some very bizarre conversations. Things along the lines of:

“Does this make me look F.A.T?”

Or

“How many C.A.Ls does this have?”

Or even, on one occasion

“Does this make my T.1.Ts look massive?” (This is not a desirable thing. And, yes, a number 1 is used to conceal the ‘i’, sophisticated subterfuge, eh?)

All of this spelling out is far less effective now that the older one is learning to read!

We’ll have to work out a new code, start asking the questions in Spanish or something -

“¿Si esto me hace ver gordo?”

“Si, muy gordo!”

Or stop asking altogether. It’s not always me, asking the questions, by the way, although predominantly  me, I suppose. And the answer to that first, loaded question is never, ever ‘yes’. We have an unspoken contract that the other person (usually him) never says - “Yes, actually, those new culottes make you look colossal!” Why bother asking, then? Just for a bit of (meaningless) reassurance, I guess. Also, you learn to rely more on facial expressions than actual words, to gauge whether something is horrendously unflattering.

“I try not to talk about weight in front of my children.”

I once told someone, rather sanctimoniously. “They’ll still notice, though.” They replied. “It’s surprising what they pick up.”

It’s not like I’m trying to make them fat or anything, although I do want them to know that it is not the worst thing in the world to be overweight. But I think that the more you obsess about weight, the fatter it seems to make you. You know, in the same way that diets make you fat, thinking and talking about it the whole time also makes you fat!  (Joan Collins always said that you never see a thin person drinking Diet Coke and she’s right!) I realise that we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic right now but I think this is partly down to the fact that we have such a f*cked up attitude to food. I really try not to offer food as a reward to my children or as an inducement to do something. I don’t encourage them to clear their plates and I think that this message is sinking in as, when we were out at lunch the other day, the older daughter told the younger one, ‘no, it’s all right, you don’t have to eat everything.’ The amount of food that ends up in the green food waste bin is testament to this. (Although I have to admit that I did find myself telling them that they couldn’t have any pudding as they hadn’t eaten any of their vegetables the other day). No, they have far less trouble wasting food than their mother does.

Anyway, I digress, the point is that I’m trying to foster a healthy attitude towards food and body image but how do you get the balance right? How do you convey that food is fuel but can also be enjoyed as part of a social experience? But that it is just food, not a form of entertainment, comfort, distraction or approval? That it’s good to exercise for your health rather than your hip circumference?

I’m sorry to bore on about this but I really need an answer before I can move on and start writing about biscuits again...

The Week in T.V

Like most people I know, I don’t watch a lot of ‘live’ T.V.  Instead, I clog my recorder up with hours of television that I rarely get around to watching, watch a few things on ‘catch-up’ or whatever my package provider calls it, a few shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now T.V. So, it is slightly inaccurate to call this post ‘a week in T.V’, it would be more apt to term it; ‘My week of viewing’.

First up, a thing that was actually on live T.V last week: 

Upstart Crow

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bp62s

Written by Ben Elton, starring David Mitchell. A comedy about Shakespeare trying to break through in his early career.

So far, quite likeable and funny. I saw David Mitchell being interviewed by Richard Herring last year, for one of Herring’s Leicester Square podcasts:

https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/richard_herring_lst_podcast/episode_94_david_mitchell/

Mitchell was talking about this upcoming project and, when he found out that it was penned by Ben Elton, Richard Herring asked;

“Is it shit?”

Mitchell handled the question with good grace, I thought, and said that he hoped not. He also said that Ben Elton was very aware that that was what people were saying about his recent output.

My first impressions, of the program, are that the cast are very good: particularly David Mitchell, and (rather surprisingly) Liza Tarbuck. It is very similar to Blackadder (which to my mind is no bad thing) - the character that Mark Heap plays could almost be brother to Stephen Fry’s Melchett in Blackadder II. I'm not really sure what they’re trying to do with the ‘Ricky Gervais’ character; the actor who has made it big in Italy. That particular joke could wear very thin but overall the program isn't bad. There are clever jokes about Shakespeare letting Christopher Marlowe pass off Shakespeare's plays as his own but I'm not sure whether that would alienate the audience or draw them in. There are also plenty of what Elton calls his 'knob gags', or in this case, gags about men playing women and shoving coconuts down their dresses.

I also tried to watch Love, Nina

But I'm afraid I fell asleep, not because it was boring but because I was exhausted. I read the book this was based on and really loved it; (Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe) about a nanny in the 1980s who works for Mary Kay Wilmers - editor of the London Review of Books. In the book, Alan Bennett comes round regularly for dinner and helps to fix a broken washing machine. The family borrow drills from Jonathan Miller and various other ‘famous’ literary neighbours make appearances. The ‘Nina’ of the letters is unimpressed and tells her sister that she thinks Alan Bennett ‘used to be in Coronation Street’! There is no ‘Alan Bennett’ character in the T.V adaptation, instead there is a dour, humourless Scottish writer. I can’t really write a review of how that works as I only saw about ten minutes of the program but one of the joyful things about the book was that, whenever one of the characters tried to be nasty about someone or pass on some scandalous gossip about one of their neighbours, Alan Bennett would interject, like a character from one of his own works, with something dampeningly mundane! I can’t help but think that the exclusion of the Alan Bennett 'character' would be to the detriment of the program.

Now, to move on to something not on general T.V, I'm going to talk about Girls

http://www.hbo.com/girls

Created and written by Lena Dunham, this program follows a group of twenty-somethings and their travails through life in New York. This program could, potentially, be intensely annoying; the characters are narcissistic, relatively affluent and, often, not very nice, but I found it totally addictive. I've just watched it up to the end of season 5 and they haven’t released season 6 yet. 

There we have one of the double-edged joys about modern T.V viewing - binge watching! All well and good when you are so captivated by a program that you just have to download one last episode before you go to bed but then you find you have vacuumed it all up and you have nothing left to watch. You are left feeling bereft (well, you are if you are me, anyway). And just why is Girls so addictive? I think, for me, it is the pull of the central character, Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham herself. Hannah is a writer, sometimes successful, often hapless and usually, despite her narcissism, self-aware. And, in almost every episode, Hannah is partially or completely naked and this is brilliant and this is brilliant because Hannah/Lena doesn't look like a Hollywood star. Hannah looks like a regular human woman; she is slightly chubby, her breasts are smaller than her hips and she is covered in tattoos.

It is so refreshing to see a ‘normal’ looking woman having sex on T.V. I read an article once where it said that we are so used to seeing ‘beautiful’ people shagging on film that it made the rest of us mere mortals feel that we didn't have the right to a sex life. Compare this to the recent T.V adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Night Manager (which I loved, BTW) where the two leads looked like Greek gods and displayed some pretty impressive thigh muscle control in their sexual shenanigans.

I guess that was in context, the characters were supposed to be beautiful; they are described so in the book (also brilliant) but it is kind of cool to see someone who doesn't look like a mythical being getting their kit off. So, thanks for that, Lena Dunham! And thank you, Nancy, for recommending Girls to me - you are right, I loved it!

One thing that I’ve been watching in an ‘old school’ way; as each episode is released and as soon as it’s been released, to avoid spoilers, is Game of Thrones. Obviously I can’t say too much about this, to avoid spoiling it for my *cough* multitude of readers...but I, too, have been affected by the...er, revival of a certain character and the reunion of certain family members and the magically uplifting and anti-ageing properties of a certain necklace….

Anyway, Game of Thrones has often been criticised for its gratuitous sex scenes and, (mainly female) nudity and it led me to think - why is the nudity acceptable (to me) in Girls but rather tiresome in GOT? It’s not just because Lena Dunham looks normal and the women in GOT look like Marvel comic women. Is it about plot? Girls is about relationships and sex, whereas Thrones is about….war, intrigue, other stuff...so the sex often seems tacked on and unnecessary. 

I think that my objection to the amount of female nudity in GOT is that, to my mind, it makes the women seem exposed and vulnerable. After all, it is even used as a punishment, in one of the episodes for one of the characters, to walk through the streets, naked, and get pelted with rotten vegetables! (I know that this scene comes from the actual books so don’t take me to task on that). There is definitely something to be said about power play, in an environment where the men remain clothed and the women are naked. GOT often looks like a mediaeval lap-dancing club! 

The notable exception to this, *spoiler!* I'm sure the program makers and the actor, Emilia Clarke, would argue, would be the character Daenerys Targaryen’s recent triumph, where she burns down the place of her captors and stands, magnificent, before its people, naked, with a striking backdrop of flames. In this context, Daenerys' nudity makes her look powerful and is symbolic of (another) rebirth.

I feel that there is something political about Lena Dunham’s nudity in Girls: look at me, she seems to be saying, I don’t fit in with Western society’s supposed ideal of beauty but I still have a right to display my body. There is definitely something empowering about that.

National Vegetarian week

I have to come clean here - I'm not a ‘proper’ vegetarian. I eat fish, I'm a pescatarian or a ‘fish-n-chip-acrit’ as someone (a ‘proper’ vegetarian) called me. But, it's National Vegetarian week, and, although I'm not preachy about it (how can I be? I'm not even a fully fledged veggie), I thought I’d compile a list of the ten best vegetarian dishes.

Humus - or, if you're buying it from Tesco, 'houmous'. Smooth and garlciky - even non vegetarians seem to like it!

Imam Bayildi: a very tasty Turkish dish (although I first tasted it in Greece!) made with aubergines. Here is a recipe:http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/10/aubergine-recipes-turkish-imam-bayildi-hungkar-begendi-roast-with-tarator-yotam-ottolenghi I have made it and it wasn't too fiddly.

Tandoori paneer - A good one for a BBQ and a very pleasant alternative to a veggie burger. You marinate the paneer (Indian cheese which seems to be available in most big supermarkets now) in Tandoori spices (by which I mean a pack of ready made spices), yogurt and lemon juice. Paneer is quite robust and will keep its shape when cooked so you can skewer it with some peppers, mushrooms etc, drizzle it with oil and voilà! You'll be the envy of all the carnivores, eating their boring, blood drenched, badly cooked meat!

Aloo Gobi: potato and cauliflower curry, I like it when the spuds are slightly mushy but the cauliflower isn't!

Mary Berry’s canapés; made with vegetarian pesto, I actually made these ones, pictured below. Here's the recipe: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tomato_and_goats_cheese_46597 But, oops, this is a BBC recipe so won't be available for long, best print it out now and put it in your recipe folder! (I don't have one either)

Baked Camembert/Brie. Stud the cheese with garlic cloves and thyme and pour a little white wine over, bake and you get a delicious dip for crudités and bread.

Goat’s cheese tart - if this is the only vegetarian option in a pub I'm quite happy, especially if it comes with beetroot and/or onion marmalade.

Portobello mushroom burger with Monterey jack cheese and pesto mayonnaise.

Vegetable Paella: the more vegetables the better - artichokes, peppers, mushrooms. Nice with a Spanish chick pea stew.

Tofu in a black bean sauce - from a Chinese takeaway, they seem to be doing a lot more tofu options now, but beware rogue bits of meat. If you make it yourself you have to squidge every last bit of moisture from that tofu. Marinated tofu is great if you can get hold of it but very salty.

Not included on the list:

Risotto - a plate of slop - not nearly as nice as a paella, not sure why...

Vegetable lasagne - not that bad, if it's home made but the frozen kind is hideous.

Not a vegetable lasagne!

Bean burger - bit too stodgy for my taste, probably a lot nicer if you make it yourself.

Surprisingly easy recipes:

Smoked tofu hash - I first had this in Vienna. Someone warned me that it was really hard to find veggie food there so I printed off a list of vegetarian/veggie friendly restaurants before we went and had the some of the best veggie food I'd ever eaten! One of the first things I had was smoked tofu hash, here is a recipe: http://vegannook.com/recipe/smoked-tofu-and-sweet-red-pepper-hash

Bruschetta - just make sure that your tomatoes are nice and ripe and that you season it well.

Frozen jacket spud - years ago, I moved in with my boyfriend (he was later to become my husband - reader, I ….) I was cooking and asked him to buy a jar of sauce with which to make a chilli, to which this troublesome blighter replied - ‘I don’t really believe in using jars’. Thus began a strict regimen of cooking everything from f-ing scratch. To be fair to him - (the food dictator) he did do most of the cooking but sometimes, all I wanted to do was have a simple supper of beans on toast. We didn't have a freezer, so couldn't do any batch cooking and far too much cooking (and cleaning up) went on for my liking. Anyway, since we’ve had kids it’s been jar central around here - curry sauces, those Amoy, chow mein sauce sachets, ready meals, the lot! Things have moved on a great deal from the bad old days, though, when we had the first sprog we lived on biscuits and pot noodles until we got ourselves sorted, I’ve never felt so unhealthy! Now we have a freezer and it’s brilliant! I’m a huge fan of the frozen jacket potato - it doesn’t even feel that unhealthy, ditto frozen, cooked rice. There are probably those of you out there who love cooking and are appalled by this but surely a frozen jacket - or ‘fro-joe’ as we like to call it in our house, isn’t the most heinous thing imaginable. If you can’t be arsed to cook you could do a lot worse than a fro-joe with some proper butter.

The Gratitude Journal

I have to apologise in advance; there is no way of writing about this without it all sounding a bit icky and sentimental. Even the name - ‘gratitude journal’, sounds revoltingly Californian and New agey. Indeed, it was an American friend of mine who first introduced me to the concept of the ‘gratitude journal’  when she presented me with a beautiful, embossed, A4 notebook, many years ago and told me what she intended me to use it for. As a writer (I've dropped the ‘aspiring’ prefix now, goddammit I'm a writer!) I love notebooks but I was a bit perturbed to find that this friend expected me to fill this one with three things a day that I felt grateful for, rather than the terribly earnest poetry I was in the habit of producing! I think I managed about 3 days of it. ‘I feel more like keeping an ‘ingratitude journal’ I told her once. She chuckled obligingly. It didn't come naturally to me, this gratitude lark, being a natural cynic and something of a miserablist. But years later I've had cause to revisit the concept. I wanted to see if it would help put things into perspective and make me, dare I say it, happier.

The good thing about the gratitude journal is that, while social media is reminding you of all the things you can’t afford, are unable to do and weren't invited to, the journal forces you to think about all the things you can do and do have in your life.

Years ago, I was watching a program about depression, with my family.  This documentary followed three different people, looking into their past, their histories and their general attitude to life. One thing stuck out for me and I've always remembered it. One of the subjects was a woman who was just turning 30. On her birthday they filmed her taking delivery of a massive bunch of flowers - a gift from her friends, they then showed her collecting her post from the doormat;

“Only four cards”.

She said, disconsolately.

‘Ah, but she got that bunch of flowers.’

My brother observed.

And I thought - yes, she is focussing on the negative, she should have been delighted that someone was thoughtful enough to organise a delivery of a bouquet for her - many people wouldn't even get that, but instead she is choosing to dwell on the paucity of her cards. I'm not judging her; I identified with that attitude! The looking for the sting rather than the honey. Not that I'm I suggesting that depression is just a state of mind that you can ‘snap out of’ if you just try and see the bright side, I just think that it is probably a common feature for people, depressed or not, to focus on what they don’t have. Of course, as human beings, we are built to strive but if we get too bogged down by all the things that (we think) are lacking, we may lose the energy to even try.  

Half empty or half full?

When I wrote the ‘Road to Happiness’ blog post:

http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/the-road-to-happiness.html

One of the things I left out of the ‘how to be happy’ list was ‘count your blessings’. After a week of keeping the gratitude journal, it had actually worked! The things I put in the journal really do range from the transcendental to the tooth-numbingly mundane. I don't really feel that I can share them here because they are so embarrassing! And yet I've shared so much on here. O.K, so one of my reasons to be grateful was finding some frozen, cooked potatoes in the freezer that made preparing dinner easier, that evening! (I did warn you that some of them were mundane) Of course I put more deeper, meaningful things in the journal but they really are too personal. What I found was, that if I filled in the journal at the end of the day, if I was feeling stressed, listing the positives made me feel more relaxed and that can only be a good thing.

I guess I should check back in on this topic and tell you whether I'm still keeping the journal in a year’s time. (And if it's still working.)

Look at this picture of the river - even when it's raining it still looks lovely. (Something to be grateful for...)

Summer Clothes

British Summer Time -  Has it been and gone now? Was that it?? (Yes, I know that, technically, it's still Spring, so don't come plaguing me with your pedantry!)

I don’t know if you've noticed, Reader, but I am trying to alternate the heavy-going blog posts with more frivolous, light hearted ones. Hence, a post about depression, followed by one on biscuits...It’s a bit like alternating heavy-going, Russian literature with a bit of chic-lit. Or, in my case, following up the magical realism of Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel); where the bitter disappointment one of the characters experiences when the man she loves marries her sister, is transferred into the wedding cake she makes for them, leading the whole wedding party to projectile vomit everywhere, with the plain, old realism of The Night Manager (John Le Carre).

So, anyway, I thought I might write about that, sometimes tricky, transition from full -on winter clobber to summer clothes. What to wear when you’re not sure what the weather is going to do. Men - I will try and do a male version of my personal choices for your benefit :)

Transition clothes:

1. The cropped trouser.

I don’t know what it is about cropped leg trousers that makes them a bit problematic (for me). On paper, they sound ideal; loose, modest (if that’s what you’re looking for), time saving - you’d only have to shave half your calf but I find them horrendously unflattering. Perhaps it’s all to do with balance - they give you a boxy, rectangular shape which is only emphasised and thrown into relief by your skinny ankles.

I bought these last week: £18 from Next.

Bargain , I thought, but only if I actually wear them… They looked nice when I tried them on in the shop and I liked the slightly shimmery effect of the material, but when I put them on the other day, they gave me a look of an overstuffed sausage!
They do cropped trousers for men too...I've yet to see some that look really nice but feel free to prove me wrong.

2) The wide-leg, floaty trouser.

These get my hearty seal of approval, they are graceful and flattering (at least, I like to think they are). They are also relatively cool and perfect for days like yesterday when it was scorchio at lunch time, but raining in the afternoon. I joined my friend for lunch and we sat on a log, in a clearing and ate in the blazing sunshine! This lovely, lush, green area in (one of) my places of work, always reminds me of that bit in Twilight where R-Patz and Kristen Stewart are lying in a meadow and he's glittering away like a candied almond. Here it is (where we sat: not the location from Twilight):

(I was a bit obsessed with Twilight when it first came out and with R-Patz (Robert Pattinson) - I don't know which is more shameful, the film obsession or the actor one...)

Anyway, the log was ever so slightly damp and I did feel it seeping through to my summer trousers but said trousers then served me very well when I was walking home, a few hours later, in the puttering rain. Floaty trousers = perfect for British Summer Time! They can take you smoothly from sunshine to rain with minimum discomfort.

Men: you could go for some light, linen trousers instead.

However, when it’s really scorching so then you might want to progress to:

3) The long skirt:

If you don’t quite want to get your pins out but need a bit of a breeze. 

I bought this one last year in the Monsoon sale - half price!

(Men, you might want to sport the long, cargo pant.)

But if it’s really hot then you could move on to:

4) The on-the-knee, A-line skirt.

(I couldn't be bothered to iron it)

Denim isn't the coolest fabric but sometimes a thick fabric can be a bit more flattering than a thin, clingy one.

Combat shorts for the blokes.

5) The Summer dress

Some fashion magazines make bold claims for ‘the dress that will suit everyone’! Really? Is there such a thing? Perhaps they should have a ‘a dress to suit everyone’, as in a different one for different body shapes and tastes (am I being a body fascist in saying this, though? By all means, if you want to wear a skin-tight, gold lurex tube, then please go ahead, regardless of body shape).

I went through a phase, as a teenager, of always wearing a jacket, even when it was scorching outside! I wasn't even fat, I just wanted to hide my bum. People really should be able to wear whatever they want. What I tend to do is find a dress shape that I think suits and stick to it, oh so rigidly, hence the reason that most of mine look the same! This is a recent purchase:

Originally £25, reduced to £15 from New Look. Most of my dresses are black and white and am trying to buy different colours, this is a slight foray into a different category in that it is black and...er sort of pink-ish and green, so there you go

Going back to the Twilight movie (do we have to? Yes, we do) it features a very good soundtrack, including one of my favourite songs by Radiohead, so I'll just leave you with that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UKu8s84S0