It’s starting to feel like 2016 all over again. All the good ones, gone. First Bonnie Tyler, at the beginning of our summer holiday. And now two deaths of beloved celebrities in two days. News of Dolly Parton’s death hit me hard. But Tim Curry's death, somewhat strangely, felt like hearing about a family friend dying. That devilish raised eyebrow, long-limbed insouciance and, oh, that voice, had been embedded in my memory since childhood. And it got me thinking about the trajectory of how he got there.

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I first saw Tim Curry’s pivotal role as Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show through the medium of the film, “Fame”. Around 1982, aged 10, my friends and I were obsessed with the TV show The Kids From Fame (almost like a proto-version of Glee) and so when the original film made it to the UK on video, we ordered it from our local independent rental shop, Sure Video in Goring, to watch on our BetaMax.

“It's not like the TV programme,” the vendor warned my mother, somewhat wearily, having, I imagine, already received parental complaints to that effect.

And it certainly wasn't. Some of the cast were the same, but the cheery, white-teethed, jazz-hands, child-friendly musical theatre vibe of the TV show was replaced by something far grittier and grimier which was, of course, the original intention. The seamy side of New York was very evident amidst the leg warmers and dancing in the streets. Swearing! Overt racism and homophobia! Drink and drugs! My eight year old brother and I watched, slack-jawed, as two of the characters smoked weed and then went to a midnight showing of what we now know was the film Rocky Horror.

It showed the audience dressing up, heckling, throwing rice at the cinema screen during the wedding scene - all of which, in real life, helped to make Rocky Horror the cult classic that it is. The scene in Fame ends with Doris, the uptight Jewish drama student, throwing off her inhibitions and doing the Time Warp on stage as the film plays behind her.

This was a taster of the real thing. We didn’t get to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show in full until it was first screened on Channel 4 in 1985, when I was 13 which, it turned out, was the perfect age to watch it. I was mesmerised from the start.

There were actors in the film that I recognised from other things, like Susan Sarandon and Meatloaf (and also, somewhat endearingly, Christopher Biggins, who was a regular in pantomime in my hometown of Worthing and who felt like someone we “knew” personally). But from the moment Tim Curry turns round in the lift and begins his first number, Sweet Transvestite, I was completely hooked.

It’s difficult to explain to people nowadays, brought up on multiple series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, that seeing a man in full make-up, fishnets and heels as a teenager in 1985 was not as shocking as they might assume it was. We had been brought up with 70s glam rock and 80s goths and New Romantics. Cross-dressing pop stars in pan stick were ten a penny on Top of the Pops every week.

But that voice…

I read recently that it was Tim Curry's idea to make Dr Frank-N-Furter sound like the Queen. His over-enunciated vowel sounds were apparently inspired by hearing an extremely posh woman in London ask an acquaintance, “Do you have a house in the town or a house in the country?” That accent, coupled with his propensity for speak-singing, and the deep bass notes he could achieve, just sent me to heaven. Tim Curry was never a beautiful singer, but his charisma, chutzpah and full embodiment of the character carried him through every singing role he played.

Everyone has their favourite Tim Curry role. For my cousin George, it’s definitely the butler in the criminally underrated film Clue. For others, it’s the red-horned Lord Of Darkness in Ridley Scott's Legend. Many children, even now, associate him with Home Alone II. Many grown ups think of him fondly from their own childhoods as The Grand Wizard in the BBC series The Worst Witch. But for me, Rocky Horror remains my favourite Tim Curry film, the one that made me sit up and take notice of him. Dr Frank-N-Furter is not meant to be a likeable or even redeemable character, but he remains deeply compelling - and sexy as hell - right to the end of the film.

My second favourite of Tim Curry’s film roles has to be Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island.

It never seems fair to me that Michael Caine gets all the glory for playing the character of Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, when Treasure Island is a far superior film - funnier, with better and more memorable songs (Cabin Fever!). Tim Curry brings his trademark menacing grin and thinly veiled malevolence to the role. There's a brilliant interview clip of him, too, playing it completely straight, saying that Miss Piggy was the love of his life and the one that got away, and you know what? I believe him.

My daughter and I watched Muppet Treasure Island multiple times when she was younger, and then came an even closer connection to Tim Curry - via the musical Spamalot.

This Monty Python musical, an approximate retelling of Monty Python and The Holy Grail with other famous Python songs and original musical material, premiered in Chicago in 2004, then moved to Broadway, with Tim Curry playing the lead role of King Arthur in both productions. It transferred to the West End in 2006, with Hannah Waddingham playing The Lady of the Lake and Tim Curry reprising his role. In 2007, after Tim had been replaced by “Jim from Neighbours” (Alan Dale), my brother, a professional musician, got the job drumming in the orchestra pit for Spamalot. It was his first long term West End gig, and we went up to support him, including my daughter, who was 7 years old at the time but already well versed in the worlds of both musical theatre and Monty Python songs. My brother had watched Tim’s performance as part of his training for the job, and was sad not to have worked directly with such a legend.

The show was great (we ended up watching it twice more, with Marcus Brigstocke and Sanjeev Bhaskar in the King Arthur role) - it's clever and silly in the best Monty Python tradition, has some amazing tap dance routines and it pastiches - well, everything, really, from mediaeval history to musical theatre itself. We bought the original soundtrack, which was recorded with the Broadway cast and so we had Tim Curry - that voice! - as the original King Arthur.

We played that soundtrack in the car on long journeys more times than I can remember, and it's Curry’s warm, deep, devilishly mischievous voice and interpretation of the role that carries through. Here's an example (all the numbers are on Spotify if you are interested).

And it was only much, much later in my journey of appreciation of all things Tim Curry that I found a clip of him on YouTube, dating back to 1982 (in a weird bit of circularity) where he played The Pirate King in the revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. My family were all huge G&S fans, and what an amazing thing it would have been for us to see this production live - especially as I subsequently found out the cast also contained a young Michael Praed (who went on to win my heart as Robin of Sherwood in 1986) and Sylvester McCoy (who played the last Dr Who of my childhood in 1987)!

Sadly, I have only ever seen clips of this production, but those serve to sum up what Tim Curry brought to each role: energy, verve, physicality and the sheer joy of performance. Have a look, and a listen, to the opening number, and watch out for the moment when he steals the conductor’s baton.

Farewell, Tim Curry. Joy-bringer.

Our Norwegian adventure continued after our first successful choral concert and the meal that ended up needing three ovens…please read my previous post for context if you haven't already!

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Lillehammer

On the Sunday morning, a group of us went into Lillehammer, because we’d been told that there was some sort of Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the local art museum. Pre-Raphaelite painting is one of my all time favourite genres, so I was excited to see what the exhibition contained.

The Lillehammer Kunstmuseum is a large, airy, purpose-built space in the centre of Lillehammer, founded in 1921 and extended in 1992 to serve as a cultural hub for the 1994 Winter Olympics, taking up one side of the old town square. This summer, the entire ground floor was dedicated to “The Danish Pre-Raphaelites” exhibition.

We found out (handily, all signs and captions were in English as well as Norwegian) that these self-styled Danish Pre-Raphaelites were a couple, Agnes and Harald Sløtt-Muller, who took Scandinavian folklore and ballads as their inspiration in the same way that the English Pre-Raphaelites took Arthurian and Shakespearean stories and characters for their artwork. Here's one example, “The Ballad About The Duke of Frydenborg and the Proud Adelil” by Agnes Sløtt-Muller, a painting of the part of a Danish ballad in which Adelil, the daughter of a nobleman, falls in love with the Duke, her father conspires to have him gruesomely murdered and the maidservants serve Adelil her lover’s heart in a stew…this picture is the point at which she realises what's happened and raises a toast to her dead lover before falling into a faint…

Gruesome, yes, but extremely compelling. The entire exhibition was thought provoking and eye-widening, and definitely made me want to find out more about the legends of this region, which were all completely new to me (but made me think of the less well-known bloodthirsty, no-happy-ending English and Scottish ballads covered by artists like folk group Steeleye Span in the 1970s about witches and curses and murdered children, like this one…

After a restorative coffee and cake in the museum cafe (the Norwegians LOVE their coffee, and even the cheapest filter coffee in any food place there is guaranteed to be top quality) we tackled the first floor, which contained Pre-Raphaelite paintings on loan from London, Oxford and Birmingham: Holman-Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais, and even a painting by my beloved John William Waterhouse. There were also rooms celebrating Norwegian art over the centuries, including the beautiful Strawberry Girl at the top of the page, which we all admired very much.

After this cultural sojourn, we travelled back to the farm for more coffee and cake, this time slices of homemade rhubarb pie and bowlfuls of cloudlike whipped cream, served to us by the very generous Annekin in her beautiful home.

It was wonderful to spend time with such a cultured and generous-spirited family, and to learn more about the farm where we were staying, which had been an important trading point for Norwegian timber for centuries.

Before we knew it, it was time to don our concert blacks once again and perform our second choral concert, this time in Lillehammer Church. It was a different acoustic in which to sing from Gjørvik, but we were all very pleased with how well it went, as I think you can see on our faces!

Nord Mesna lakeside cabin

On Monday morning, it was time to say goodbye to the beautiful farmhouse setting, wish the other choir members safe travels, and journey a little further up the mountain, to a smaller lake, Nord Mesna, where the four of us had booked a lakeside cabin.

We weren't entirely sure what to expect from this place, as it had electricity and WiFi (priorities!) but no running water. Frank, the proprietor, was there to let us in (the cabin was on a private estate with an electronic gate) and show us around.

The location was stunningly beautiful and blissfully quiet, with decking leading on to a small track down to the lake. Inside the cabin there was a small kitchen and cosy (very hygge) living area, two double bedrooms and a shower room. Frank showed us that the shower had to be filled with water to the desired temperature then pumped with a foot pump to operate it. Only my friend Avin actually attempted this, and likened it to running a marathon in a box, in drizzle. The rest of us contented ourselves with stand up washes and the prospect of the lake outside.

For toileting (and we had been very intrigued by this prior to arriving) there were two options: a sit-down urinal ("Men must sit too; is good for the prostate, heh?” Frank chuckled) and an incinerating toilet with a metal bowl which you covered with a brown paper liner shaped a bit like an inverted paper boat, put the seat down, did your business, lifted the seat and folded the top of the paper liner neatly (like a literal shit sandwich bag) then closed the lid, pressed a button and the whole lot slid into the incinerator below. Very clean, very efficient, very Scandi. I was fascinated by it - to me it felt like going to the toilet in space - but then I am very easily pleased.

We were given four large containers of drinking water and six of washing water, and there was a standpipe within walking distance and another at the gate. Our fears about dehydration were allayed, but it was very weird having a sink in the kitchen with no tap, and not being able to wash one’s hands straight after prepping onions.

But of course, for keeping clean, there was the lake. My husband went down and rinsed his clothes and bashed them on the rocks, then hung them on the balcony to dry, (finding, identifying and eating wild bilberries on his way back to the cabin like a real man o’the woods) and Sam gamely took the inflatable paddle board Frank had left us on the first day, but it took me a while to pluck up my courage to swim in the lake. Not least because the lack of rain, even here, had made the water levels drop, and so getting to the lake from the house involved downhill drops and scrambling over sharp and slippery rocks, like some kind of assault course.

But of course it was worth it. Oh my goodness, it was exquisite.

Swimming in glacial lake water is like being wrapped in cold silk. As you pull with your arms, the soft splashes either side of you sound like little bells. The water is at the same time dark and clear. It's a completely refreshing, exhilarating experience. And the most stunning views wherever you looked.

In the evenings, we prepared meals together and it was cold enough to contemplate lighting the fire - Frank had left us a good stock of seasoned birchwood logs which burned beautifully. It was wonderful watching the flames, then turning to watch the sunset over the lake.

The time passed in blissful serenity (apart from my husband going down with a bad cold on the second day, but as there were no requirements to be anywhere, he just spent most of the day in bed) and then once again we had to say goodbye to an almost painfully beautiful place, and start the last leg of our journey, back to Oslo. On our last morning in the cabin I woke up early and slipped out of bed, to watch the sun rising and the mist drifting over the lake. I wanted to hold this moment in my heart and treasure it. What a total privilege to be able to experience and be in this landscape. It made me feel small, and humble, and expansive and grateful all at once.

Oslo

Norway’s capital city, two hours’ drive away from our lakeside retreat, is a bustling, modern place with a very clean, laid-back, hipster-ish vibe. We stayed at Hobo Hotel, a newly reconditioned building in the heart of the city, five minutes’ walk from the central station.

Our room was small but with a large bed - and - joy of joys! - a walk in power shower. Feeling fully cleansed and refreshed, we ventured forth for our only restaurant meal of the holiday, at a place I had researched and booked before flying out, Elias Mat & Sant. A tiny place with only about 20 covers, it specialises in traditional Norwegian ingredients served with modern flair.

We all wanted to try the elk carpaccio, which was, interestingly, sweeter and lighter than the traditional beef, and served with juicy lingonberries as well as parmesan, olive oil and rocket.

We also sampled the reindeer stew, which was tasty if a trifle chewy (reindeer is very lean and almost offal-like in texture), but were most intrigued by the fact that smoked beluga whale was on the menu. Beluga whales are not endangered and so it is, if you eat meat, ethically OK to have it, but it still felt to me a bit like ordering ortolans in France or - I don't know - smoked unicorn or something. A plate of decadence with a hint of criminality. Still - when else in our lives were we going to have this opportunity? None of us wanted to order it ourselves, in case it was horrid and we had food envy. We asked the waitress what it was like. “It's difficult to describe,” she pondered. “But it's very meaty - why don't I get you one portion and you can share it?”

So we did, and, reader, we did not regret it. Meaty, delicious, tender, with a sweet and saline hint. Here's the plate, the smoked beluga whale with a sour cream sauce and cubes of golden beetroot, with the four of us about to fight over the final two slices.

On our final morning in Norway, after a delicious and substantial buffet breakfast at the hotel, Sam, Avin and I ventured out to the harbour beside the Oslo Opera House, to a floating sauna which the two of them had found and used when they had arrived in Oslo the day before I did the previous week.

This amazing place, a series of 20 or so wood fired saunas on floating platforms attached to a dock, was, according to the notice at the entrance, created in 2016 under the banner of “sauna for all” by a group of anarchists and diplomats (!) who were part of an Ice Fishing Enthusiasts Group (!!). The idea of anarchists and diplomats working together just tickles me, but mine is not to reason why, only to enjoy the sinus-clearing, resinous heat of each sauna followed by a skin-tingling dip or plunge in the cold, darkly crystalline waters of the fjord. And repeat, for 90 glorious minutes. It was worth the trouble of having to carefully double wrap a damp swimming costume and towel in my suitcase back at the hotel, in order to experience this sensory delight. Our skin was glowing and our eyes were bright. When I arrived back at Gatwick 10 hours later, it was incredible to think that we’d been sea-bathing in Oslo Harbour that very morning.

Norway, you have been amazing. I can only hope to return one day and experience once again your generosity and beauty. Here we have feasted indeed - with every one of our senses. I can only hope to hold onto some of that transcendental beauty, calm and hygge as term time approaches.

I will leave you with one more video from our choir concert, this time Wherefore Tonight So Full of Care by Finzi, a setting of a poen by Robert Bridges. The final verse is a fitting conclusion to our Norwegian adventure:

“O happy life! I hear thee sing,

O rare delight of mortal stuff!

I praise my days for all they bring,

Yet are they only not enough.”

I’m home from a week in beautiful Norway, and already I’m longing to go back.

I was there as part of a choir tour, organised by my conductor, Matt Jelf, whose brother-in-law is an organist in Gjørvik Church near Lillehammer. Members of our chamber choir, Brighton 16, were invited there to sing as part of a series of summer concerts put on by the church. There was subsidised travel, and three nights’ free accomodation, available for only eight singers. When Matt sent the initial email asking for expressions of interest. I have never hit the reply button so hard and so quickly. And to my great delight, I was offered a place.

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My experience of choir tours is, sadly, limited, but previous trips nonetheless had a profound impact on me. In around 2004 the then conductor of Worthing Choral Society, Adrian Bawtree, organised a tour to Bruges, and in 2007 the same group of us travelled to Krakow in Poland. Singing in ancient European churches with organ lofts and amazing acoustic delays is a fantastic experience for any choral singer; plus, of course, you get to try out the local food, drink and culture of a place you may not have chosen to visit were you planning a holiday for yourself. Performing, socialising and relaxing in the company of like-minded people is a bonus, although it can also be a risk - you do learn about all sorts of facets, habits, quirks and stressors of different folks when you holiday with them!

For this trip, my husband, who had visited Norway decades ago when he was in the army, was very happy to come too, as a non-singing plus one. Sam, my musician friend, was singing tenor in the choir and his partner Avin also came along for the ride. The four of us hired a car together and decided to extend our holiday after the concerts were over.

Driving from Oslo Airport, we skirted the edge of the Mjøsa, the largest inland lake in Norway, on our way to Lillehammer, surrounded by forests. It was vast and beautiful, all the blues and greens such a contrast to the scorched earth we’d left behind in the dreadful English heatwave. Every time I looked at the lake, I felt a pang in my heart so intense it was almost painful. We spent the two hour drive wide eyed and sighing, “Look at that view!” on repeat.

Our accomodation for the first three nights was a converted barn on the farm owned by Matt’s sister in law's family just outside Lillehammer. This is the view of the farm from the bridge across the Mjøsa - our barn is the dark brown building on the far right.

We tumbled out of the car on arrival to be greeted by Martin, the farm's elderly dog, who, worryingly, had a fascination for moving car tyres (we were perpetually worrying about running him over during our stay).

The barn was ancient, but had been converted into accomodation for the Lillehammer Winter Olympics in 1994. There were small twin rooms, a large living area and kitchen, and washing areas in what would have been the cellars.

Best of all, though, was the view over the lake that greeted you from the front of the barn. It was stunning, and constantly changing and shifting with the light levels and weather. You could sit and watch it for hours.

As we settled in for our first evening after rehearsing our choral pieces in Lillehammer Church, our hostess, Annekin, who’d been on the organising committee for the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and is still a very well respected figure in the community, came down the hill to greet us, bringing a freshly baked raisin loaf, still warm from the oven, and a huge pat of Norwegian butter (something she’d just casually made “after a board meeting and then going to the theatre”, she told me). We tucked in hungrily, and there was enough left to be toasted for breakfast the next day.

The Saturday lunchtime concert in Gjørvik was well attended and very positively received (our programme was 20th century a cappella choral work by Parry and Finzi, some of my favourite pieces to sing, plus a couple of songs by Norwegian composer Delius).

It was followed by an invitation to a late lunch at the organist Paul and his wife Henriette's beautiful house, where we were treated to cheeses, smoked fish and cold meats, including the traditional Norwegian favourite, fenalår or air dried lamb (“Parma Lamb” as we ended up calling it) which was as delicious as you can imagine it would be, plus the most exquisite home made spinach and feta tart, with pastry so soft and crisp and blissfully short, it tasted as though it was made with cheese, although according to Henriette it was just copious amounts of that all important Norwegian butter. We were definitely in our happy place.

After returning to our barn accomodation and having a well earned siesta/food coma, my thoughts turned, inevitably, to the evening meal. I had offered to make a pasta bake for the six of us who were staying there, having brought some orechiette and red pesto in my case (always a good self catering standby that needs no refrigeration and can be eaten plain or with whatever refinements the local supermarkets will provide, which in this case was onion, garlic, peppers, long stem broccoli, feta, sunblush tomatoes and parmesan). Avin said he'd help me prep.

I went to turn the oven on in the barn. Nothing. No lights, no heat. I tried the electric hob, leaving it on for a few minutes. Nothing. I looked around for a main switch on the wall, in the nearby cupboards. Nothing. All I could find was a little white box that looked like a miniature router, which had fallen behind the microwave. But it didn't appear to do anything.

I asked my husband to go up the hill to find someone to help us. Johanna, Annekin’s stepdaughter, came down to tell us we needed to switch on the switch on the wall. “But there is no switch!” we cried. She looked too, and then picked up the miniature router thing.

It turns out that most Norwegian cookers have a radio controlled remote thermostat on the wall, which is where this device should have been. If the hob gets too hot, the thermostat beeps and the entire oven turns itself off. I can see that this is quite a sensible device in a country where many of the houses are made mainly or entirely from timber. This thermostat, however, had fallen off the wall and also looked like it had run out of batteries. Johanna marched back up the hill to acquire some. We waited, not daring to start prepping the vegetables, just in case it didn't work and we’d have to go over to Lillehammer for a MacDonalds.

Johanna returned with working batteries. But, try as she might, the thermostat would not function. And without it, neither would the cooker.

After some thought, Johanna said, “We do have another kitchen you could use - in the clockhouse”. This was another barn, which had been converted to a dining area for up to 50 Winter Olympians in 1994. We gamely trooped up the hill to the clockhouse with our ingredients and pans - only to find that the kitchen area was up a set of stairs so steep and narrow they were almost a ladder. At the thought of carrying a hot pasta bake for six people down those stairs, both Avin and I shook our heads. It just wasn't worth the risk. MacDonalds it would have to be.

Then Johanna paused and said, “Well, we do have a third option…you could maybe use Anniken's kitchen…”

Anniken was very accommodating when we explained our plight, said it was fine with her as they had already eaten, and invited us in to her beautiful Arts and Crafts style farmhouse.

This was the part of Anniken's kitchen that we used (note the teatowel hanging over the thermostat on the wall, a trick she uses to stop it beeping all the time):

And this was the rest of the kitchen, which was, jaw-droppingly, like a living history museum:

Only an hour and a half after trying to start, we finally got going on the pasta bake. Avin popped down the hill to let the others know when to lay the table, we got to grips with the recycling nuances (food waste here, glass and metal separately, plastic and card in a third bin), and when it was finally in the oven, I went down the hill to make a salad and put lemon wedges, olive oil and salt on the table for people to dress it themselves.

There was no way I was going to carry a hot and heavy pasta bake down a grassy slope at twilight, only to drop it and dash everyone’s dinner plans, so our friend James (who’d kindly forked out for some pricy imported basil at the supermarket to add to the dish) was given that responsibility.

When we were finally sitting down and people plated up and started eating, there was that moment every cook dreams of, when every voice fell silent, and the room was full of people enjoying what they’d just put in their mouths. It was all worth it, every moment of confusion and frustration, to hear the glorious sound of silence that accompanies good food being appreciated. Avin and I will remember that meal for a very long time to come.

In my next post, I want to tell you about the lakeside cottage we moved to after our choir duties were done, and how that contrasted with our final couple of days in the city of Oslo.

I’ll leave you with a couple of videos of the choir, from our Gjørvik concert. The first one is our opening number, My Soul, There Is A Country by Parry, full of Edwardian pomp. The second video shows two early pieces by Delius, a gentle Ave Maria and then a very jolly piece in Norwegian (which was a challenge for us to sing!) called, appropriately enough, Her Uta Skal Gildet Staa - or Here We Shall Feast. Enjoy!

My husband and I watched The Odyssey on its opening weekend. Despite it being VERY LOUD, we both enjoyed it immensely, and discussed it quite animatedly over the following days. It is also, admittedly, VERY LONG, but it didn't feel like that to us. I only checked my watch once, which turned out to be half way through, and that was more to check how much time had passed than because I was bored. I was most definitely not bored.

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From the moment the bard Demodocus, played by rap artist Travis Scott, struck his stick on the table (banging out the dactylic hexameter in which Homer’s epic was written, I found out later) to the bittersweet sunset ending, I was hooked. I loved the immediacy and physicality of the Trojan horse and its exhausting transport from the beach into the city. I was surprised and moved by how sympathetic I felt towards the monstrous Cyclops and his barbaric treatment by Odysseus. I squirmed with the body horror of Circe’s transformations and was transfixed by Samantha Morton's highly original take on the enchantress (John William Waterhouse this was not).

Gradually, then all at once, the media has collectively lost its mind about Christopher Nolan in general and The Odyssey in particular. It didn't seem to matter what people's political leanings were - MAGA supporters and bleeding heart liberals seemed to be equally offended. Elon Musk was stratospherically enraged that Helen of Troy was not portrayed by a white woman. All sorts of people complained about “unhistorical” elements, despite the fact that the source material is a fictional epic poem based on Greek mythology, rather than fact. The American accents were heavily criticised - because, of course, everyone knows the Ancient Greeks only spoke English in RSC Received Pronunciation. And Emily Wilson, sister of food writer , has written - twice - about how much she dislikes the film, despite the fact that the opening line of her acclaimed translation of Homer (“Tell me, muse, about a complicated man”) has been credited as Nolan's inspiration for the film’s direction. Wilson and other critics have also called Nolan out for filming in Moroccan occupied Western Sahara, where the indigenous Sahwari people cannot document their own stories without fear of persecution. Which is a fair point.

Speaking to friends of mine who’ve watched the film, most of them have been a bit “meh” about it. “I’m glad I watched it, but I never need to see it again,” was a typical response, which, considering that's exactly how I felt about after visiting Auschwitz on a Polish choir tour, is hardly a ringing endorsement for The Odyssey as great entertainment.

When I asked my friends if they knew much about the story of Odysseus prior to watching the film, though, most of them admitted they didn't really know much about the source material.

It got me thinking about why I enjoyed it so much, when many of my friends (and critics worldwide) did not. And I realised that I am in a very niche “sweet spot” for being an audience member for Nolan’s version of The Odyssey.

People who don't really know the story either see the film as either too long and boring, or provocatively inaccurate. Academics who know the story exceptionally well complain about how much has been left out from the source material, AND see what has been left in as provocatively inaccurate.

I am in the position where I know the story well enough to appreciate what Nolan is doing with his retelling, and know Nolan’s work enough (Interstellar and Inception being particular favourites of mine) that the time jumps and narrative spin don’t faze me, but I’m not an academic scholar of either Homer or film studies, so I can come to this version with a relatively clear mind. However, I’m not an Odyssey novice.

My interest in mythology stems from being read myths and legends from all sorts of cultures from a very young age. The first collections of Greek myths I remember reading for myself were the Ladybird ones:

Book 1 and Book 2 were on my childhood bookshelf and read so often that the spines fell off. I ended up taking them to university, where they (and my teenage Bible study) proved invaluable when I took a unit on Classical Heritage during my English Literature degree - the way that Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian writing influenced later writers, particularly the Romantic poets such as Tennyson. And from the poets I was led to an abiding love of Pre-Raphaelite art, which in its turn was influenced by the Romantics.

But it wasn't only high-falutin’ art and classic poetry that deepened my understanding of Homer’s epic. Being immersed in the stop-frame animation techniques of Ray Harryhausen, particularly in the films Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans as a teenager, made me realise the debt Nolan paid to these classic interpretations of mythology. When I watched The Odyssey, every time the ship sailed to a coastline and the companions disembarked and walked round a cliff face, my instinctive reaction was to anticipate which Harryhausen-constructed monster would appear around the corner. Of course, they didn't, but Nolan's film created the same delicious anticipation of what film certificates now call “moderate peril” that I remembered from those earlier Hollywood epics. And I think his refusal to use CGI helped in that regard - it felt like a classically old-school fantasy film, rather than a computer game.

And of course, in the back of mind, somewhere this theme tune is always playing:

Ulysses (or Ulysse, in its original French) 31 was a Japanese/French collaboration, an animated series setting the cast and plot of The Odyssey into the 31st century (with loveable small robot companion Nono, of course - the critics would have a field day!) first broadcast by the BBC in 1985, when I was 13. It wormed its way into my psyche in the same way that episodes of Monkey and Star Trek did, on TV before teatime and homework took over; a programme that as a teen you could gently mock but secretly love. Many of the twists and turns (and indeed character names) in the Odyssey are familiar to me solely because I watched Ulysses 31.

These were the cultural references I brought to my viewing of the film. And for me, it felt like a worthy and well-intentioned version of this heroic and tricksy character’s trials and travails. There was more to admire than to criticise, more to think about than to dismiss.

When Odysseus turns to Penelope at the end of the film and explains his idea that people will have to sing the story of their abiding love, because reading and writing will have become a lost art in the war and civil collapse that is to come, knowing that he caused it all by breaking Zeus’ law of hospitality with the Trojan horse, I cried. Not just from catharsis, but in the knowledge that Nolan, through Odysseus, is speaking to us as an audience, in the modern day. How much we stand to lose, when civility becomes optional, revenge is more important than community and compassion is seen as weakness. We learn from history that we do not learn from history. So too from mythology.

The Odyssey as a film is certainly not perfect, but its flaws as well as its brilliance make it an unforgettable cinematic experience. I am glad it is in the world and I will watch it again.

Have you seen The Odyssey yet? If so, what prior knowledge did you bring to it, and what did you think? Please do let me know in the comments.

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First of all, I went with friends to Bauji Bistro, a new Indian restaurant in my home town of Worthing, owned by a guy who has a Michelin star for the original Bauji restaurant in London. We are really spoiled for choice when it comes to restaurants here, and there are several well-reputed Indian places just a stone’s throw away from Bauji, so to earn its keep it would have to be doing something pretty special.

I had been warned by my friend Victoria, who’d eaten there the previous day, to avoid the signature prawns, which, despite having the recommendation that Grace Dent keeps a photo of them on her phone “to look at when I’m sad”, are, when it comes down to it, just three (3!) citrus-flecked shell-on crustaceans, for £18. But the rest of the menu was fair game and, actually, reassuringly reasonably priced.

We started with a selection of small plates, of which the stand out flavour pairing was onion and samphire bhajis. My fellow diner Sam said you couldn’t taste the samphire, “and anyway, samphire is mainly texture anyway”, but I begged to differ. Obviously when deep-fried, samphire does lose its succulence. But what it adds to the bhaji is a subtle, almost hauntingly saline quality that lifts the dish far above the ordinary. I was smitten, and will definitely be back to Bauji for more. I might even keep this photo on my phone to look at when I’m sad.

Next, I chose a dish because I just had to try it; it sounded so unlikely. In the Grills section, they had Tandoori Avocado and Venison. I’ve tried and liked baked avocado before, so I knew what to expect from that element of the dish. But venison with it? How would that work?

When it arrived, it looked like the Mighty Boosh face logo, which made me laugh.

Two avocado halves sat on top of a turmeric yogurt sauce. The avocado halves were slightly charred at the edges and dusted with spices. When I cut into one of them, I found that the hollow where the stone had been was filled with a warm, spiced tomato salsa. On top of that was a spoonful of gently spiced cream cheese, then slices of rare tandoori venison, bringing masses of wild umami richness and a beautiful, melt in the mouth texture. The whole thing was unexpectedly exquisite. I mopped it up with a warm paratha, exclaiming at every mouthful. This was a dish that could have gone so wrong in so many myriad ways (the concept reminded me of something an ambitious cook would overstretch themselves with on MasterChef) but it was all so perfectly, delightfully right. I’m very glad I didn't do what I nearly always do, which is order the butter chicken. This was a flavour combination I’m glad I challenged myself to try.

Then yesterday, I had my friend Antony over for coffee and a catch up. It was around lunchtime, and after about an hour and a half of conversation, I realised that neither of us had actually had lunch. We’d both eaten earlier in the day, so weren't in need of anything more than a snack. I said I had something I wanted to try, if he was up for an unusual flavour pairing, and luckily for me, he was.

The combination I had in mind was from ’s new tome The Kitchen Book (which everyone should own, in my opinion) and it was a suggestion rather than an actual recipe. What she suggests is to get posh sea salt and vinegar crisps, crumble a block of feta on top and then mix in some fronds of dill. So we did. As Ella says of this combination: “Elegant! Deranged! Unstoppable!”

After digging in to a communal bowl (and dropping too many feta crumbs on the carpet) we agreed that this would probably work better in individual bowls unless you are decidedly more decorous an eater than either of us. It totally worked, though, as a snack - each bite having more acidic punch and crunch, or softness from the cheese, or liquorice herb flavour, depending on the combination in your fingers. A bit like a Scandi version of chaat, I suppose. I knew Antony would probably like this, as he was the one who introduced me to the ultimate pimped bar snack, which I’ve written about before here: shaking a bag of dry roasted peanuts into a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. See what I mean? My mouth’s watering just thinking about it.

And finally, last night, I made a recipe I’d looked at for a while but needed the holidays to be here in order to dedicate the time to it: a Thai Fish Pie with Crispy Turmeric Potatoes from Gurdeep Loyal's brilliant book Flavour Heroes.

This was my favourite type of fish pie, where all the seafood is tumbled in, raw, in a thick sauce, then is topped with potato and baked for about 40 minutes. I have never seen the point in poaching the fish first; you're cooking it in the oven anyway, so why overcook it?

Gurdeep’s recipe calls for fish pie mix in a combination of green curry paste, ginger, lemongrass, lime zest and juice and toasted dessicated coconut, with shredded Thai basil, coconut milk, then topped with thinly sliced potato brushed with a turmeric and nigella seed infused butter. Unfortunately, they had run out of fish pie mix at my local supermarket, so I went for the 3 for £12 seafood option, which turned out to be raw prawns, hake and tuna. I have never used raw tuna in a fish pie, but felt it would work with the Thai flavours and add a meatiness usually given by salmon. I also added the rest of the packet of dill I had left over from the crisps. I’ve made Vietnamese fish dishes before that have included dill, and I reckoned it would blend well with the aniseed tones of the Thai basil.

I served this with a green salad and it was absolutely delicious. I often find, when I make a Thai green curry with chicken, aubergine and sweet potato, that I can't decide which element of the dish I like best: is it the unctuous, sharp-sweet-spiced coconut sauce, the soft, sweet, yielding vegetables, the comforting savouriness of the chicken, or the sharp aniseed spike of the basil? I keep tasting and re-tasting, until suddenly my bowl is empty. And it was the same here, except with the addition of crispy-edged, meltingly soft, buttery golden potato slices to dip in the spicy coconut sauce. Utterly divine. And enough in the pot to have leftovers for another day.

Have you been surprised by a flavour combination recently? Was it in a restaurant or something you made yourself? I’d love you to let me know in the comments. And if you like what you're reading, clicking the heart at the bottom goes a long way to make this post more visible to others.

I’m very excited to have been asked to collaborate on a project with and , all to do with picnics, inspired by George Seurat's painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte and the 1984 Sondheim musical Sunday In The Park With George which was inspired by the pointillist painting.

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The picnic itself, with selected picnic fare from a variety of contributors, can be found here and here. I think it's just wonderful that, through the medium of Substack, writers from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres will be able to gather, virtually, under the shady trees in 19th century Paris to share food food, drink, memories, stories and music together. What a lovely thing to do! And you can all be a part of it too.

One of the things Lisa asked me to do was to provide a Spotify playlist for the picnic. I was inspired by the Sondheim to incorporate some musical theatre into the set, as well as pieces that, for me, conjured up the dreamy, hot, sun-dappled, romantic French setting. I wanted music to make you daydream. The playlist is available here and I hope you enjoy - please let me know your favourites!

Another thing that several contributors have wanted to do is to share their experiences of picnics and picnic fare in their posts this week, linked to the main event this weekend. That got me thinking about what picnics mean to me, as a food writer.

Picnic Type 1: The Spontaneous Picnic

Some people are put off picnics by the amount of advance preparation needed (the Insta-perfect jam jar cocktails and string-wrapped brown paper packages of pan bagnat), and the fact that so many foodstuffs don't travel well, ending up sweaty/ melted/ stale/ covered in ants (and that's just the cook!) before the picnic rug can even be unrolled. But, searching through my photos for images of picnics past, the majority of them feature shop-bought produce far more than homemade fare.

When my daughter was younger, picnics were a really good, low-cost way to spend a day in the holidays, particularly if we went to a park with a play area. Friends would phone or text and say, “shall we meet in the park with a picnic?” and it was a matter of moments to cut up some crudités, pop to the local shop for some hummus, crisps, fruit and little cakes, and we could be set for the day. Up until my daughter was 10, there was an open air paddling pool by the seafront which was free to use and had grassy spaces round it, shaded by trees, where the adults could sit and watch and read (in those glorious days before mobile phones!) and the children could be in and out of the water all afternoon, with an ice-cream from the kiosk and a picnic tea before hometime. (That paddling pool was taken away by the council in 2011, and replaced by a concrete “splash pad” which is not even an adequate replacement in our eyes.)

I think a sturdy, not too heavy cool bag or cool box, lock-and-lock containers, a waterproofed picnic blanket, melamine plates and paper napkins are essential picnic kit, but other than that, nobody needs to fret about making Scotch eggs from scratch or preparing elaborate seafood salad and worrying about food poisoning. Go to M&S or Waitrose or Lidl, buy delicious picky bits, find some screw top wine for non-drivers and enjoy spontaneous al fresco eating.

Picnic Type 2: the posh picnic

There are only two picnic occasions where I’ve had to up the ante and make the majority of the items from scratch.

One was at my daughter's private school, Lancing College. On the last Saturday in May they have Founder’s Day, which is a combined prize giving and end of term celebration. There are speeches in a marquee on the lawn, and then it's picnic time, followed by sporting and musical events and (much more up my daughter's street) the Founder’s Day Play in the open air amphitheatre (in her final year there she played Rapunzel, among other characters, in Sondheim's Into The Woods).

Here, the level of competitive picnicking was off the scale. There was lobster. There was caviar. Some families brought their own napery and silverware, including candelabras.

For these sorts of occasions, my mother and I would make our own quiches, quince-glazed chicken, lemon posset with blueberries, pop the Champagne and just enjoy being a bit fancy and seeing how the other half lived.

The other occasion was the first and only time (so far) I have been to the Glyndebourne Opera House, a couple of years ago, with my friend Sam. It is a grand tradition at Glyndebourne that opera-goers bring (or purchase) a picnic to enjoy in the grounds during the interval. The year we went, the heavens opened as we arrived and so we stowed our picnic baskets in a corridor rather than staking our claim on the lawn as you are meant to. However, once the opera (Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers) had reached the end of Act One, the sun was shining once again, the lawn was dry and there was more than enough space for everyone.

Sam had brought delicious homemade sausage rolls. I had made a muhammara dip with vegetables, the quince glazed chicken (a Sabrina Ghayhour recipe) and some parkin (a type of gingerbread, excellent for picnics as it travels and keeps well) and, again, the Champagne flowed. It was a brilliant experience and one that will linger long in the memory.

Picnic Type 3: the car picnic

Interestingly, one of my family's most beloved memories of picnic food are not set on shady lawns, under trees or by the sea. They were consumed in a stationary car, in the unprepossessing environs of Portsmouth ferry port car park.

When my parents bought their holiday house in France 11 years ago, my stepfather's preferred ferry crossing was the overnight Brittany Ferry from Portsmouth to Caen, as this maximised the time spent in actual France. The need to be at the port at least an hour before a 10.30pm sailing, plus what he terms “cock-up factor time”, often meant that we did not have time to eat dinner before packing up and travelling.

My mother got into the habit of producing a “car picnic” for us to eat once we were safely at the port, but before we boarded the ferry. It quickly became a tradition (my daughter and I insisted) that she would make us rare roast beef sandwiches, then a punnet of cherries and some mini flapjacks. The “starter” was the only thing that varied: in the autumn, a flask of homemade pea and mint soup to be drunk from disposable cups; in the summer, a prawn and mango salad with a coconut dressing brought in a separate pot and poured over at the last minute. Every mouthful was a taste sensation, enhanced by the anticipation of the holiday to come; every bit of those car picnics was made with care and love. I miss them, because unlike other picnic types, I can never recreate them in the way she did. But I do have her recipe, which I am happy to share with you.

There's a legend in my family, regarding my mother. She's not around to ask any more, and there are few remaining people to ask about the veracity of it, but this is how it goes.

When my mother was a teenager, she got a Saturday job working in a Fortes cafe in Surrey. (That's the Forte which eventually became Trusthouse Forte, the hotel/Little Chef/Happy Eater chain, but in the 1950s was a string of cafés and ice-cream parlours owned by Italian-born entrepreneur Charles Forte.) I asked my aunt, my mother's sister, what the Fortes cafe was like, because I’d imagined it in my head like a chintzy 1950s hotel dining room, but she said, “it was more like Costa is now, quite a plain coffee shop.” I found a photo of a “Forte” cafe in Dundee which models itself on the 1950s Fortes, and it looks like this. Note the small white swing doors to the kitchen at the back of this image:

So, the story goes, on her first day working there, she was carrying a tray of Chicken Maryland from the kitchen into the cafe. The swing doors swung back onto her rather too vigorously, she dropped the entire tray on the floor, and was so embarrassed that she hung up her apron, left the cafe and never went back.

Of course, when my brother and I first heard this story as children, our immediate reaction was, “But what IS Chicken Maryland?”

My mother told us it was fried chicken with a fried banana on top, and that it was a very popular dish in the 1950s and 60s. This seemed like a hallucination to our late 1970s ears. Fried banana with chicken? Surely the sort of weird outlandishness that Elvis would request on his tour rider, but ordinary folk in Reigate and Redhill? Really? And so this story passed into family folklore, made more memorable to us as children for the fact that my mother was not known for dropping things (in fact she was incredibly graceful; I was, and am, the clumsy one in my family) and the sheer exoticism of a dish we could never have imagined into existence.

I can’t remember what got me started on researching the origin of Chicken Maryland more recently. Maybe it was receiving the Magnalite cookware last year (which I wrote about here and here). Maybe it was this article that I came across by accident, about the fact that Chicken A La Maryland was the last meal served on The Titanic, a fact that came to prominence when the menu came up for auction in 2023.

Whatever it was, I’ve been researching the background and trialling a recipe for over a month now, and I think I’m ready to share with you what I’ve found out about this rather obscure and historically complex dish, which is “just” fried chicken, but has earned its (slightly obscure) place in culinary history.

The Somewhat Confusing History of Chicken Maryland

To begin with, we need to define what we mean when we say “Chicken Maryland”. First mentioned in cookery books in the late 1800s, it was, first and foremost, a method of cooking rather than a recipe. Many Southern states had a tradition of frying chicken for celebratory meals, much of it from methods and cooking implements brought over by the enslaved population who worked the fields or served in white people's kitchens. In most of these, the chicken was breaded and deep-fried in oil or lard in a deep sided open pan until cooked and crisp. The Maryland method of cooking differs from this by using a shallower pan, much less oil or fat, dredging the chicken in seasoned flour and then cooking with a lid on the pan for the second half of cooking, so that the chicken steams as it fries, keeping it tender.

Confusingly, there is also a deep fried breaded chicken dish which is called Maryland Fried Chicken (much like Kentucky Fried Chicken) which is and was very popular in the States, but is not Chicken Maryland.

To make internet research even more baffling, in Australia and New Zealand, the term “chicken marylands” is used to describe a whole chicken leg. Looking up a recipe for “Chicken Maryland” and not filtering it by country can lead down all sorts of pathways, including recipes for “jerk chicken Maryland" and “Moroccan chicken Maryland” as in this charming but confusing website.

Many of the original recipes did not include any kind of garnish, and only some referred to any kind of sauce. It was world-renowned French chef (and erstwhile rogue) Auguste Escoffier, who gave the recipe for “Chicken A La Maryland” (hence the “a la” on the Titanic menu) in a book he published in 1903, which began the association with fried banana. It is assumed that this is how Escoffier was served the dish when he toured America collecting recipes. Much in the way that Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, with the best of intentions, preserved folk music in aspic rather that letting it breathe and evolve once they’d written it down, Escoffier's recipe became the standard version of the dish - the way that people who had never visited the States assumed it should be served. Escoffier also added sweetcorn fritters, fried bacon and a horseradish-infused cream gravy to gild the refined gold of the chicken itself. The use of banana was subsequently explained by the fact that Maryland is apparently the largest US importer of bananas; but if you ask for Chicken Maryland in Maryland today, the banana garnish may well not feature. The cooking method, and the cream gravy, are the real stars of the show as far as many US cooks are concerned.

However, just as folk music keeps evolving despite the purists’ best intentions, Chicken Maryland took on a life of its own once it hit the UK. In their book The Prawn Cocktail Years, published in 1997, Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham state: “It seems that everyone of our generation to whom we have recently talked recalls the frankly weird Chicken Maryland with great affection…Southern-style cooking has always been a touch weird to us Limeys, but it is based on sound principles.” Chicken Maryland in Great Britain in the 1950s was very much a celebratory dish, not for everyday dining, and definitely something people would be served in a restaurant (or Fortes cafe) rather than preparing at home. Which is strange, given its origin as a home cooked dish. And then, a couple of decades later, it fell completely out of fashion, along with tournedos Rossini and black forest gateau - to the extent that my brother and I in the late 1970s had never heard of, still less tasted it.

But another fact I found really interesting while researching is that Chicken Maryland lives on in the UK today - in a somewhat unexpected quarter. Some Chinese restaurants, particularly those in Scotland, still have Chicken Maryland on the menu in their non-Chinese food section. Here, it's deep fried and served either with a sweetcorn fritter, fried banana or a battered pineapple ring. And, thinking about it, deep frying is what many UK-based Chinese restaurants do best, with the fried banana/pineapple already on their dessert menu, so you can see the appeal of a dish that’s deep-fried, beige, doesn't frighten the (Scottish) horses and is easy for Chinese cooks to prepare with the equipment they already have.

Making Chicken Maryland at home

And so to my own experience with making Chicken Maryland at home (you can read another home cook’s trials and tribulations with it from 2016 here - I found this very useful before starting my own experiments!)

Having read the BBC article about chefs using dried mushroom extract in the sauce in tribute to his mother using canned mushroom soup, I decided to use a tin of my beloved Campbells Condensed as the basis for the gravy (I’ve written previously about this great store cupboard staple here). I also added shredded cavolo nero, because I had some in the fridge and because it felt a bit like collard greens (to a person who only knows about collard greens from reading Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou books for A Level English…apologies).

I’d decided I was going to be “authentic” about this, Escoffier be damned, and not use banana or anything else as a garnish.

The chicken (I used legs, so wherever you’re from in the world it was either a single or double chicken Maryland - chicken maryland Maryland? Malcovich Malcovich?) cooked beautifully in a bit of butter and oil, and my fears about soggy skin when the lid was on were allayed - both sides of the meat were crisp and delicious and the meat really tender. I cooked it for about 25 minutes with the lid on, after browning it on what chefs call “the presentation side” and it cooked through really well.

The sauce was the problem, though. I had drained off as much of the fat from the pan as I could, then added the soup, some creme fraiche, a splash of stock and a squeeze of lemon. I should have made it in a separate pan. It was far, far too oily, and also, because of the condensed soup, too salty. My husband ate the chicken but left the sauce on the side. I struggled through it for the sake of research, but wished I hadn't.

For my second test, I stuck more closely to the recipe from The Prawn Cocktail Years, and decided to relent and add the fried banana, since it was this element that had so intrigued me when I was first told about my mother and the tray of Chicken Maryland.

Oh my goodness, it was glorious. The picture at the top of this post is how I served and ate it this evening. The caramelised sweetness of the banana against the crisp and yielding umami of the chicken and the slight pokiness of the horseradish cream gravy - truly a match made in heaven. Or, indeed, Maryland. Just don't serve it on a tray, if your kitchen happens to have a swing door.

I may be many things, but I am not (yet) a natural gardener.

Granted, I have a good track record in keeping house plants alive. But the nurture of nature in a garden is something that just doesn't feature as a priority for me. I leave the house at 6.30am for work five days a week and often don't return until 7.00pm. In the winter months, that means I hardly ever see my garden in daylight. Weekends are often filled with choral singing, food planning and shopping, housework and socialising. So any plant that is going to live in my smallish, north facing back garden needs to be the type that thrives on benign neglect.

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We have an elderly damson tree that fruits every couple of years, and a fig that's planning to take over the world, or at least my garden shed, about which I have written here before. We have a dwarf apple tree that a friend gave me, that’s tenaciously hanging on despite the wild rose above it, that’s stealing all the light. In spring, yellow flag irises raise their heads in the corner where a pond used to be, and the borders fill with Spanish bluebells and three cornered leek (garlicky edible white bells).

We used to have a beautiful ceanothus tree that bloomed in glorious powdery blue each May, but it blew down in a storm one year. And the delicate pink, self-seeded Japanese anemones I used to enjoy each September were ripped out by my friend Alain one spring, because they weren't in flower and looked like weeds.

Alain is a very old friend of the family, by which I mean he’s the same age as me, but we’ve known him for years. He's a gardener and odd job man, wears shorts whatever the weather and occasionally pops round unannounced to chat about TV shows, books, films, music, politics, war-gaming - and bring us a bag of windfall apples from the place where he's been gardening. I tend to ask him twice a year to do a thorough “slash and burn” of the neglected garden, hacking back the bindweed, ivy and brambles so I can at least sit out in it, although since the Japanese Anemone Incident, I have been careful to ask him not to rip out anything that looks like it might belong there.

When Alain came round about a month ago, luckily before the succession of heatwaves, not only did he clear the borders of weeds and clinging things - he rediscovered two currant bushes that my mother had planted for me over 15 years ago and which I thought long dead.

Surrounded by brambles on which are growing the biggest, juiciest blackberries I’ve tasted in years, are two intertwined bushes - a blackcurrant and a redcurrant. The blackcurrant only had a few dark jewels remaining, but the redcurrant yielded several ruby pendant earrings’ worth on the first pick, with the promise of more to come.

What to do with them? When I’d last knowingly had a redcurrant bush, I’d made a redcurrant fool with the crushed fruit and softly whipped cream. I remembered I’d used a Nigel Slater recipe, so I reached for my 1994 paperback copy of Real Fast Puddings.

As a teenager, I fell in love with the way Nigel writes about food - at the same time so encouraging and so precise. He knows exactly what he likes and he has no doubt you will like it too. Of redcurrants he says, “a favourite fruit of mine - it is their acidity that appeals…generally around during June, July and August, they are very much a sign that high summer has arrived.” And he then gives a recipe for a warm red fruit compôte which, he writes, should be served “warm, in a white china dish”. (See what I mean about precision?)

I decided to adapt this recipe, because I had a tub of raspberries and blueberries left over in the freezer that hadn't all been eaten by my Book Group ladies that week.

Underneath this recipe, Nigel writes about serving red or whitecurrants with fromage frais (the French soft cheese rather than the Petit Filous variety):

“Unmould some fromage frais onto a plate. Surround it with little sprigs of currants, red and white. Sit in the shade spreading the fresh white cheese on to tiny, crisp water biscuits, then scatter over a few red or white currants. Utter bliss.”

(It’s the instruction to “sit in the shade” that makes this so delightfully evocative, I think.)

I didn't do this with my second redcurrant crop this weekend, though, because my husband requested, nay, demanded, a crumble. I used the same mix of fruit as for the compote, having bought more raspberries and blueberries, and used this recipe which I have written about before (and is, indeed, the only crumble recipe you’ll ever need). Again, it's a Nigel Slater classic, from the same recipe book.

Even though the compôte necessitated standing at the stove, and the crumble needed a hot oven, I didn't begrudge either of them, because the results were so delicious, and, because of the redcurrants, genuinely refreshing.

Who knows? When I finally get to retire from teaching, I might find the time to develop my green fingers. I might even replant some Japanese anemones. But for now, I’m mightily thankful to Alain, for rediscovering horticultural hidden treasure. And to Nigel for giving me the culinary inspiration. Next, I need to harvest a few of the leaves and use my recipe for blackcurrant leaf sorbet…watch this space. And let me know your favourite ways to use red fruits in hot sunshine!

Much has been written about how we are not set up in this country to deal with extremes of weather. A 36°C day in the UK is not like a 36°C day in Madrid, say, because our humidity levels are often more than double those in mainland Europe due to our island location. This means the sweat that should cool us by evaporation cannot escape so easily into the air, our bodies have to work doubly hard to regulate our temperature, and the effect of so called “tropical nights”, where the temperature exceeds 20°, means that we cannot use sleep time to recover. The Met Office data l looked at showed that on Thursday night, the temperature in my home town at 1am was 29°.

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Our homes - and many of our public buildings - are designed to retain heat rather than expel it. Unless you are in a British supermarket or a train, air conditioning is extremely uncommon in this country. The most comfortable times I had this week were in Waitrose, Tesco and on the Southern Rail journey I use to get to work (7 whole minutes of utter cooling joy!).

When I walked out of the air conditioned supermarket on Wednesday morning, having bought my lunch, and into the blast furnace that was 27° heat at 7am, I had a sudden, visceral memory of walking out of a Spanish supermarket on holiday in Majorca, aged around 8. In my head, I had just bought an enormous packet of unsalted crisps and the obligatory Pez sweets with a Goofy-headed dispenser (neither of which was readily available in the UK at the time) which I would enjoy after my siesta and before my afternoon swim. But I was not in Majorca. I was on my way to work, in a school where only 2 out of the 20 rooms had ever been fitted with air conditioning, where the windows only open 15 cm “for safety” and where classes of 30 to 32 children are the norm. No siesta or swim for us. I could have cried, but it wouldn't have brought any relief. The tears would just have stayed and mingled with the unevaporated sweat on my sad, sticky face.

So, how have we been coping with the heatwave this week? Read on to find out…

Dealing with a heatwave at school

The first thing we did was to let children come to school in PE kit all week. We had outdoor breaks only in shaded areas and encouraged (even more than usual) regular water drinking in class. Windows were opened early in the day, blinds down and lights and screens off wherever possible.

On Wednesday afternoon, having struggled through the day even with these adaptations in place, and with staff and pupils increasingly exhausted, knowing Thursday was due to exceed 30° again, we had a strategy meeting. As with snow days (we’re much more used to planning for those), no school wants to be the first in their area to announce a closure, so locality heads contacted each other to offer similar solutions. We knew that a full school closure would be extremely disruptive for working parents, but also that we couldn't continue as usual. So we tried to offer a package that could help. We let parents know that if they did not want to bring their child to school due to concerns over the heat, the absence would be authorised. If they wanted to collect their child after lunch, to avoid the hottest part of the day being spent in school, that was also an option. And if they needed their child to be in school all day, we would remain fully open for them.

Having these options meant that, for the last two days of the school week, we had on average less than half a class in each morning, and after lunch numbers dropped low enough that we could group the children into the two air conditioned classrooms and rota the adults to supervise them. We had to be off-timetable, but luckily our children, used to a continuous provision approach, are very good at choosing their own collaborative or independent learning activities. One of our teachers bought and distributed ice pops each day, which went down very well with pupils and staff alike. Our school business manager quickly organised the purchase of fans for each room, including desk top versions that plugged into computer USBs for office staff.

The general feeling in the school was one of pulling together, being solution focussed and making the best of a situation beyond our control. Next week we’ll be back to normal, but with 3 1/2 weeks of term still to go, and heatwaves like this due to become more frequent, in the long term we’ve been discussing the fact that the government is going to have to invest in some form of wholesale air conditioning for our state school buildings - or even go to a Spanish model of opening earlier then closing schools after lunch in the summer. Siesta and swim, anyone?

Dealing with a heatwave at home

At home, there are three main things that have helped: keeping as cool as possible at night, minimising cooking at a stove, and replenishing electrolytes.

Our bedroom is in the loft, which in the heat of the summer becomes like a sweat lodge. We dealt with this as best we could, by having a fan in the room (in our house in France we have ceiling fans, which are surprisingly effective), and sleeping wrapped loosely in sarongs rather than using our duvet. Our boiler is currently broken (replacement is not coming till next week) so obligatory cold showers have been the order of the day.

One day this week after work we went for a swim at our local pool - oh, the joy of moving one’s limbs through cool water without breaking out into a sweat! - then used the pool showers to have a proper hair wash in warm water.

In terms of food, anything you don't have to use heat to cook is a good thing, anything that replaces fluid, salts and sugars is even better. Take lessons from cuisines that are designed for hot/humid weather. So basically, eat salads, ripe fruit, and order Thai, Turkish or Mexican takeaways. After the swim this week, we went to our local Thai place and had beautifully refreshing summer rolls and a spicy beef larb, eaten al fresco. (NB I hadn't really thought about it before, but posted earlier in Notes that spring rolls must be seasonal, because summer rolls exist. So are there autumn and winter rolls too? And if so what are they like?)

writer Helen Graves posted a brilliant recipe recently for tajin-macerated strawberries (tajin is the addictive Mexican spice blend of chilli, salt and citric acid used to season padron peppers or salt the rim of your spicy marg), which I made alongside a no-churn soy sauce caramel ice cream, both of which were very well received.

in her new tome The Kitchen Book also recommends putting a punnet of grapes in the freezer - and it is a game changer. In very hot weather I also tend to have cravings for salty stuff like biltong and marcona almonds, which is obviously my body’s way of helping me not to have leg cramps during those tropical nights (it hasn't entirely worked - note to self: buy more biltong).

My daughter, now in her second trimester, and never a lover of tomatoes, is currently having cravings for juicy slices of huge beefsteak toms - she sent me this link for a “tomato flight” which, I have to say, looks bloomin’ delicious (if an awful lot of prep work).

And my final piece of advice for dealing with a UK heatwave? Complain about it. It's not just a national tradition, it's a form of social bonding. Whatever your political views, age or location on the north/south divide, complaining about the weather unites us as Brits. And when it starts raining or becomes unseasonably cold? You can be sure we’ll complain about that too.

What top tips do you have to share about dealing with a heatwave? With the next one due to hit the UK in only a couple of weeks’ time, we need to support each other through this as much as possible.

Lovely weather for the time of year…

We could have chosen to do many things this weekend. I should have been singing in my choir’s concert (they were singing The Wedding Song, written for my own daughter’s wedding, as one of the pieces, so I felt really bad about not attending, but I’d written the concert date incorrectly on my calendar). We could have celebrated the King’s official birthday. We could have celebrated Trump’s birthday (although that was never really going to be an option)! We could have gone to Donington to watch acts as diverse as Pendulum, Baby Metal and James B Partridge’s Assembly Bangers (yes, really!) at the Download festival. And we could have joined the protesters at the anti-racism, anti-fascism rally in Brighton. Well, it was less than a rally, more of an actual carnival.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20ykkw4vd3o.

The photos from the streets of Brighton looked utterly joyous. A few hundred angry, red-faced men, completely outnumbered by the joyous crowds in their thousands, celebrating the diversity that makes this city, and indeed this country, the vibrant place that it is.

It's been a very challenging week for the UK, with partisan feelings being stirred up on both sides and people living here who have a heritage other than White British feeling genuinely frightened. I did like the completely open message on this placard, although, unfortunately, this sums up the feelings both sides have for each other:

But look at the banner in the background. “We are all foreign”. The children in my Year 4 (8 and 9 year olds) class all know that the Celts, who were in Sussex before the Roman invasion, had migrated here from mainland Europe, that there were soldiers of colour in the Romano-British army, that the Saxons settled (and gave their name - South Saxon - to Sussex) until the Norman conquest, and that the Normans themselves were basically Vikings who had become Gallic. They also know a little about the British Empire and how our connections with places like India and Jamaica developed. They live, most of them, in an affluent leafy suburb where less than 2% of the population is anything other than White British, but these children see racist acts happening in history, and on the news, and they react with confusion, disbelief and righteous anger. How could anyone treat somebody else as less than a person because of their heritage or skin colour? I know that a few of them may even have taken part in yesterday's carnival - and they won't have been on the side of Stop The Boats.

But I wasn't doing any of those things. My family and I travelled up to Matlock, in the Derbyshire Dales, for a friend’s 60th birthday party.

There were about 50 people gathered at my friends’ beautiful home, to celebrate him - and he is an immigrant, from New Zealand, although, as many Leave voters were quick to reassure him after Brexit, “we didn't mean YOUR sort of immigrant”. He’s a huge Thunderbirds fan, so there was a Tracy Island birthday cake, plenty of buffet goodies, and a lot of singing and laughter.

As we drove into Matlock off the M1, we were greeted by the sight of many Union Flags and St George Crosses hung at half mast on lampposts and street signs. My friend had warned me that Reform had won several local councils in this area. We wondered whether the flags were flying at half mast as some sort of protest at the state of the nation - although, as the loyal patriots they claim to be, this was deeply disrespectful, on the King’s birthday - or whether that was just as high as their ladders could reach. At any rate, it was a mildly depressing sight.

But then I thought of my friend, and his husband, and the fact that I had attended their wedding when gay marriage was legalised, and how happy and settled they are in their community, and how many people had travelled from across the country to celebrate with him.

And I thought of the experiences I’d had in the two service stations at which we’d stopped on the way, one on the M25 and one on the M1.

Service stations are a microcosm of society. No matter the colour of people’s skin, the language they speak, the job they have or the car they drive, everyone needs to relieve themselves and to eat and drink during a long journey.

We saw Orthodox Jews quietly sipping tea. Hindu families dressed up in their finery, the women in jewel coloured saris, a young boy in a pale blue suit with a bow tie, the adult women sharing their food with the grandmother in the party, making sure she had a taste of everything. A couple of Jamaican men speaking loudly in heavy patois and laughing at each other's jokes. A group of young women in trouser suits and headscarves with the most perfect, glossy make up, gossiping in the toilet doorway. A large group of men of various ethnicities in hi-vis jackets, queueing for the gents. A lone youth with studded black jeans, long hair and a ripped Iron Maiden T shirt, looking slightly lost.

It's a bit like being at an airport. A liminal place, where everyone is equal and everyone is just passing through. And the mood everywhere was calm, respectful and positive. No angry red faces. No shouting of taunts or jibes. Nothing being set on fire. No police presence needed.

At my friend’s birthday party, and at those motorway service stations, joy was winning.

Joy is fragile, yes, but resilient too. It can be created anywhere, even when things feel overpoweringly awful. If we let grief and fear stifle our voices and direct what we choose to do, the only changes that happen will be ones that make things worse. But every time someone makes a conscious choice to choose respect rather than fear, curiosity rather than anger, love rather than hate, joy wins.

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First of all, a huge thank you and welcome to all the new subscribers who have come my way this week via my post about my daughter's wedding. I have no idea what the Substack algorithm goddesses were doing when I reposted the article to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, but it seems to have struck a chord with people. So, welcome to my little corner of the Substack world, where I, The Social Apothecary, dispense reflections and wisdom about things that I find joyous or intriguing, and that you might too. All of my previous posts are free to access, and range from culinary history, film reviews and poetry to cocktail recipes and deep dives into the current state of education, so feel free to browse and let me know your favourites.

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The Gourmet Girls met again this week to share food, wine, gossip and life advice. High on the agenda: what to do with men who love bomb then guilt trip on the Facebook Dating App; the fact that there is such a thing as the Facebook Dating App (!); the exhaustion of being in the sandwich generation; and the delight that, with all our combined life and foodie experience, there are still previously untried flavour combinations that can surprise and delight us.

The menu this month took an Asian direction, as the hostess wanted to try out a recipe from the Gok Wan cookery book another Gourmet Girl had given her for Christmas.

We started with shop-bought prawn crackers and spring rolls, but made it Gourmet, by taste testing two batches of the rolls, one cooked in a conventional oven and the other in an air fryer.

The one on the right, the air fried version, was ready more quickly, and although both tasted the same, the air fried one had better lamination on the outside and thus was crunchier. So, a win for the air fryer.

The main course was the first unusual ingredient pairing: Gok's recipe for griddled lamb and cucumber skewers. The lamb is cubed and marinated in a satay-like mixture of peanut butter, fish sauce, soy and sesame oil, then put on a skewer with chunks of deseeded cucumber and grilled. The recipe states boneless shoulder of lamb, but, if you can get it, for flavour and ease, I would recommend the butterflied boneless leg of lamb that Sainsbury's sells in a vacuum pack in the fresh meat section.

None of us had ever had grilled cucumber before, but, like grilled lettuce or charred spring onions, it was a revelation. Firm, sweet and springy, it was reminiscent of the stalk end of a cabbage - in a good way. It went brilliantly with the umami, tender lamb and the fresh cabbage salad that accompanied it.

The beauty of lamb, certainly for less confident cooks, is that it's almost impossible to overcook it. I like my lamb pink in the centre, and our host cooked it to perfection for me, but two of our number like their lamb more well done, and so took their skewers back to the griddle, almost but not quite setting off the fire alarm with the smoke that ensued…but that's another good thing about cooking with really good friends, as opposed to restaurant dining or social climbing dinner parties. There's no awkwardness about saying that you’d like something changed, and then doing it yourself. No reticence, or standing on ceremony, with the Gourmet crew. Life's too short.

Another of our number, who could not be with us on this occasion, had provided the recipe for a brown rice salad, bejewelled with red pepper, raisins, parsley and toasted cashews and dressed with a soy, lemon and fresh ginger dressing that went perfectly with the lamb.

For dessert, I had wanted to try an Ottolenghi recipe for a pineapple, yuzu and herb sorbet that I’d seen on his Substack. It’s more of a sherbet than a sorbet, because of the inclusion of dairy with the fruit and sugar. I love the taste of yuzu, a citrus fruit which is very popular in Japan and resembles a cross between lemon, perfumed orange and grapefruit in flavour. You can buy 60ml bottles of the juice in Waitrose, although I imagine it's cheaper to get from Asian supermarkets.

The thing that intrigued me about the recipe was the inclusion of the herbs. Pineapple and mint I’ve had many a time, but pineapple and mint AND basil AND tarragon? How would that work? Ottolenghi also recommends serving it with a sprinkle of sea salt and a drizzle of olive oil, which puts it even more on the side of a salad rather than a dessert. But it was too intriguing not to try.

The original recipe tells you to blanch the herbs in boiling then iced water, to preserve the green colour, but since the leaves were getting whizzed up with citrus and then immediately frozen, I didn't think there was much chance of oxidation happening, so I skipped this step. Then it was just a case of blending up chopped pineapple, yuzu juice, herbs, a bit of sugar and a couple of heaped tablespoons of Greek yoghurt, freezing the mixture for at least 4 hours, then tipping it back into the blender to aerate it before freezing ready to serve.

I practised it the week before our gourmet meeting, and thought about what would work best as an accompaniment. Some sort of fruit, to boost the sweet versus savoury element, I thought. First of all I tried peaches, but this didn't quite have the effect I wanted - and was made more frustrating by the fact they were clingstone, so when I cut round the circumference and twisted, my fingers squelched through the skin rather than separating the fruit cleanly in half. Annoying. Next I tried frozen mango chunks, which was nice, but again not exactly the flavour combination that I wanted. Finally, I tried it with some of the leftover fresh pineapple - and it was perfect. Sharp, sweet, completely refreshing. But after making my second batch to take to Gourmet, I didn't have any pineapple left over.

Corner shop to the rescue. A tin of pineapple rings was just the job (and actually, had British Chinese restaurant vibes that were in keeping with the rest of the meal). Pineapple ring in the base of a bowl. Quenelles of sorbet on top. Mint leaf, sea salt and olive oil to garnish. Result - happiness.

It's the kind of flavour profile that would be absolutely exquisite on a boiling hot day like the weather we had last week - thirst quenching, lip-smacking and curiously moreish.

As if to concur with our theme of unusual flavour combinations, while we were eating, as we looked out over our friend’s back garden, a large fox appeared on the back wall. It had something in its mouth. It looked like a red squirrel, but we don't have red squirrels in Sussex. I hoped it wasn’t someone's pet.

We eyed it, and it eyed us, bold as brass, as we contemplated each other’s meals. Eventually we worked out it was holding a piece of bread (possibly a waffle?) and a large carrot. How's that for a flavour combo?

I can't give you a recipe for the fox’s meal. But our Gourmet Girl recipe sheet is available in pdf form here.

It feels like all I have are questions, and no actual answers.

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My social media feed is bombarding me with adverts that are making me question what would make my life better than it is currently (and it's currently pretty good; it's just very full on at the moment). Would Ankhway functional mushroom gummies make me feel more balanced? Would a Shapermint camisole make me look more toned? Is a Bloomchic swimming costume and sarong combo a good idea for a large bust and a short torso? Who knows? Not me. I can't decide about any of it, and the adverts keep showing up on Facebook and pummelling me with their persuasive powers. Where do I put all these feelings?

Where should I put my feelings about the fact that my daughter is expecting a baby in November (a totally joyous announcement she revealed to me at our Eurovision party last Saturday) but that on Friday, completely unexpectedly, her gorgeous little Jack Russell, Pebble, died from suspected heart failure at under a year old? The vet said there was nothing that anyone could have done. He was such a joy bringer and my daughter and her husband gave him the best life and so much love in the short time he had on this earth.

I feel achingly sad for them, and blissfully happy for them, all at the same time. I’m going to be a granny! So many emotions, all at once.

I was going to be travelling to France at the beginning of the summer holidays with my cousin and her children and their partners, which had its own complications because of the logistics involved and the fact that the holiday clashed with an important choir rehearsal for me, but now we're not going to France because of said logistical complications, and I’m relieved, but sad, because we're not going to France and I won't be with my cousin.

Work has been unusually intense this past couple of weeks, and I need to write my end of year reports (always a blot on the landscape at this time of year for a teacher) but the sea is calling me. I swam with my daughter at Saltdean beach yesterday, one of the three cleanest beaches in Sussex, and we bobbed in the water that was warm for about eight centimetres’ depth from the sun and then gaspingly cold beneath, and talked about the pregnancy and Pebble, the Jack Russell, and laughed and were quiet and processed a bit, and felt the sun and the salt on our skin and had a picnic on the beach with Sabrina Ghayour’s quince glazed chicken strips that I made with the last of the home made membrillo from last year that I found wrapped in greaseproof at the back of the fridge, and a bread pudding I’d made with dried apricots, sour cherries and crystallized ginger and a loaf of unused defrosted bread from my school’s caterer. And it was lovely. And needed. But the reports still loom.

I’ve done two loads of laundry and hung them outside to dry because the weather is so warm, but I read an article this morning saying that people with allergies (ie me) shouldn't hang laundry outside because of the very high pollen count this week. Any breeze that dries the clothes also embeds pollen until the fabric, and then it's brought into the house and triggers all the histamine responses. But it's free, and it's so much more pleasant than using my dryer. Do I run the risk? Will my future sneezing, wheezing self hate the decision to go for eco friendly solar power?

I also need to do more housework, but what I am actually doing is arranging beautiful peonies, given to me by one of my oldest friends, in vases and looking at them, and reading ’s The Kitchen Book and recognizing some of the recipes from her newsletter and wanting to make All The Things. And feeling my shoulders drop. But then the minutes tick by and I feel like I should be doing something more productive. But I don't.

And my friend has travelled down from Birmingham, which is lovely, and we shared a Chinese takeaway last night and laughed at old jokes and quotes and memories like we always do when we get together. But she is down south unexpectedly because her father in law, who has dementia, is close to death and her husband needs to be with him and support his mum, even though there is literally nothing they can do but watch and wait. And that is heartbreaking. So where do I put all these feelings?

Here. I’ll put them here. Thank you for letting me lay them down. You don't need to do anything with them. Just leave them where they are, and by the time I pick them up again, once I've written this and made a few lists and had a coffee, maybe they'll have untangled themselves. And if not, in the words of my husband, a therapeutic counsellor, who gave me the best advice on grief when my own father died, I can feel all the feelings, not deny them, sit with them, and if need be let them go.

I’ve written before about The Gourmet Club, the cookery demonstration classes my mother pioneered and ran for over 40 years until her death in 2020.

Those of us who remain in the local area from our original Gourmet Club group (one of 6 groups that my mother ran each month), meet as Gourmet Girls on the first Thursday of the month, 10 months a year (leaving aside Easter and the summer holidays in August, when it's too difficult for us all to agree a date). We alternate meeting at a restaurant, and congregating at one of our houses. When we meet at home, we concoct a menu in the way my mother would have planned her classes, but co-create the meal rather than leaving it to one person. The host chooses and makes the main course, and the others elect to bring a starter, side, dessert or drinks. We organise this all in advance via Whatsapp, and the recipes are all sent to me to collate and put on a recipe sheet for us all to take home at the end of the evening.

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Last month, our host, Carina, found a recipe for a sausage and cavolo nero broken lasagne, and so our collective thoughts turned to Mediterranean flavours. I had just returned from a holiday to France, and so was eager to share my recipe for celeriac remoulade, which always makes me think of being in the Charentes. I suppose it's having the time to peel and shred the celeriac (the shredding blade on a food processor makes short work of this, but in France we have a Moulinex grater like this one, which takes time - and occasionally barks knuckles - but creates the sort of long, almost cylindrical strands I really appreciate when making and eating a remoulade).

It's important that this dish is cohesive but not sloppy. For a whole small celeriac, you need far less mayonnaise than you think (a tablespoon will often be enough). I like to flavour mine with Dijon mustard, salt, pepper and lemon juice. I would usually add chopped fresh parsley, but last time I was in France there was none available (presumably because everyone who lives there full time just grows it in their potagers), so I had to make do with (freshly bought) dried parsley and it actually worked really well. You don't get the annoying bits of green shards against your tongue or stuck in your teeth that you get with the flatleaf variety if you don't fully chop it into submission (which I very rarely do). I am going to be careful to use up the jar of dried parsley quickly though, because if you let it go out of date you might as well be adding dust as far as flavour is concerned.

I served the remoulade heaped on little plates with a draping of Parma ham, fresh black figs from Waitrose, a drizzle of good olive oil, some grinds of black pepper and some mint I’d nicked from the aperitif cocktails that were being served. They were described as “restaurant quality” when they were brought to the table, which pleased me for something that is very easy to make, in fact mainly assemblage. And the flavours pleased me even more - the fresh, cold, nutty celeriac with its soft punch of mustard mayonnaise, the salty silk of the ham, the mild fruitiness of the figs, all coalesced in the mouth to something which was far greater than the sum of its parts.

My friend Lindy had made some wild garlic butter to serve with decent bread, and my friend Jane had made a green salad with a dressing we all exclaimed over - she told us it is what her mother would call “toss” - a French dressing made with a splash of maple syrup. It woke up the palate beautifully.

The broken lasagne was savoury and deeply satisfying. We all agreed we would make it ourselves and that it would be popular with our families.

Dessert - after we had left an appropriate pause, filled with book and TV recommendations, catch ups with the various stresses and joys in our lives and interactions with Carina’s various pets who were trying to snaffle the leftovers - was a Georgina Hayden recipe for baklava cheesecake that made us all feel like maybe, just maybe, everything was all right with the world.

And as if to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, my friend Ali had made us some chocolate bark, stuffed with dried fruit and nuts, to have with coffee.

The other recipes for this menu, I am really hoping, will be found here. (As I write my Substacks entirely on my phone, I couldn't find a way to attach a pdf to this without adding it as a link as in the one above. If the link doesn't work, please let me know. Alternatively, if anyone knows how to attach PDFs to Substack posts when using an Android phone, get in touch!)

I love spending time with my Gourmet Girls. It's always uplifting, always affirming, always restorative, and has been for the nearly 30 years since some of us first joined my mother's group. We always leave feeling enriched rather than depleted, whether that's with advice, a new book to read, an anecdote to share or a menu full of new recipes. I hope you feel the same in this Substack space we share.

My stepson is staying with us for the Bank Holiday weekend, having travelled from Exeter. He messaged my daughter, and she and her husband said they wanted to come over too.

“We could go to Crabshack…” my daughter said hopefully.

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Crabshack is an institution in Worthing. An unprepossessing seafront restaurant with stripped wooden tables and a wonky floor, it serves seafood so incredible that it consistently wins local and national awards, and has recently been name checked by none other than Rick Stein.

“I need to save money for my trip to Norway this summer, so I wasn't planning to go to a restaurant,” I explained.

Silence.

“But I could cook for you…?”

Silence. Then…

“I suppose you could make some zhoug chicken. And maybe some brownies? That would be ok.”

Zhoug chicken, one of my daughter's favourite dishes, is incredibly simple to make. It’s basically a jar of zhoug, a spicy Yemeni-style paste that I buy from Waitrose, spread onto boneless chicken thighs which are then cooked in a moderate oven for about half an hour. The Waitrose zhoug is, by all accounts, not in the least authentic, but it is tasty: citrussy and herbal with a chilli kick.

I served these with some yogurt flatbreads (equal quantities of flour and plain yogurt mixed into a dough then rolled out and dry-fried for a minute or two on each side until puffy), a red cabbage salad with shallots, mint and red wine vinegar, and a green salad with the “little dryad” avocado and herb dressing from ‘s latest Substack post.

So far, so easy. But I decided to go to town a bit more on the dessert. Brownies had been requested, and at Crabshack the brownies are served with a raspberry coulis and pieces of honeycomb, so that's what I decided to do.

I have many brownie recipes in my repertoire, ranging from deep and cakey to shallow and fudgy, and everything in between. Personally, I prefer the centre of my brownie to be fudgy, but I do love the crunchy contrast that a corner piece gives. The classic for me, one I return to again and again, is Nigella Lawson’s version in How To Be A Domestic Goddess. It's heavy on the dark chocolate (no cocoa powder) and instructs one to beat the eggs and sugar together with a spoon rather than whisking (which makes them dense and unctuous but does not produce an overly meringue-like crust).

When I woke up this morning, I was already thinking about what I could do with the basic ingredients to make my brownie. I love additions like walnuts, or dried sour cherries, but my daughter prefers it plain. Then I thought, inspired by experiments from and - why not make these brownies with brown butter? The nutty, caramelized flavours of the butter would go perfectly in a brownie recipe, I thought.

When I looked online, of course, dozens of people have already had this idea. So I used a blend of the online recipes and my trusty Nigella version, to create my brown butter brownies. The main deviations I made from the Domestic Goddess recipe, apart from browning the butter, were to add some light brown sugar (amplifying the caramel notes) and to use an electric whisk to mix the eggs and sugar.

The resulting brownie was everything I could have wished, apart from the fact my tin was rectangular rather than square, which meant the mixture was shallower and therefore could probably have done with about 3-4 minutes less in the oven. The outer edges were a just a bit too cakey for my liking after it had cooled. But the centre was still nicely gooey, and strangely, the edges I’d cut off and left in the tin had all disappeared after my stepson and daughter had gone through the kitchen after lunch…

Wishing you all a very lovely Bank Holiday - something tells me we could all do with an extra day off at this point in the year! And do let me know if you try this recipe.

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I love living in my home town of Worthing, on the West Sussex coast, “between the blue and the green” as they say locally, meaning the sea and the Downs. But if I had the means, once I finally stop teaching, I’d want to retire a little further east, to Shoreham-by-Sea. There are a host of new-build houses on the south side of the tidal river Adur there, with views to the sea beyond and the neo-Gothic Lancing College Chapel, where my daughter got married last year, on the hill to the north. But even better to my mind is Shoreham Old Town, with its thriving independent boutiques, monthly food market and flourishing arts scene.

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Every April for the last decade, I’ve taken part in a free concert held at the beautiful, ancient St Mary De La Haura church as part of the Shoreham Word Fest to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday. It’s always held on the nearest Saturday to the 23rd April, the Bard's birthday and also, apparently, the date of his death. I got involved in this project via my friend Emily Longhurst, an amazing natural voice specialist, folk song leader and sound bath practitioner (and, incidentally, one of the three people indirectly responsible for me starting this Substack). Emily and I first met over a decade ago as part of a Worthing Community Play about the Victorian riots in my hometown, and then worked together on a lottery-funded project where a group of us learned sea shanties and recorded a CD as part of preserving our intangible cultural heritage - this was a good few years before The Wellerman went viral on TikTok.

Through Emily, I was asked to join a small group of instrumentalists, to learn and perform some Elizabethan songs as part of the Shakespeare Fest. We called our group Sounds and Sweet Airs, a phrase from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is always a privilege to work with these dedicated, talented and self-effacing folk musicians, playing and singing pieces as varied as the mournful Willow Song and the wildly rousing Agincourt Carol, and we always enjoy our annual get togethers.

A few years ago, Emily and I decided to add to the programme by performing a duet, a version of Shakespeare’s Full Fathom Five arranged by the Irish folk singer Maeve. I sang from the front and Emily joined in from the middle of the aisle in the second verse, which always surprised some members of the audience who didn't know she was there. It was a beautiful and haunting version of Ariel’s song, and went down so well that the following year the indomitable organiser of the concert, Janet, asked us to perform it again. And again, the year after that.

But this year, lovely as the song was, we wanted to branch out and try something different. It still needed to be something from Shakespeare, but what? We tossed around a few ideas, including a hypnotic, minimalist version of some lines from Romeo and Juliet, but then I became inspired by something I had heard on the soundtrack to the hugely underrated BBC drama Dope Girls (about which I have written before on Substack).

The soundtrack to Dope Girls was performed by the contemporary London based vocal group NYX, who incorporate world music, Eastern European harmonies, trance beats and folk lyrics in their compositions. One of the most compelling pieces was an arrangement of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.

Strangely, with all my experiences growing up with the folk and folk rock scene, I had never heard this tune before. Perhaps because my two favourite bands, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, never covered it. I was not a huge fan of Pentangle, otherwise I’d have recognised it from their more well-known, jazz-inflected version of it.

Finding the NYX version online also led me to two different, but equally beautiful renditions of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme: Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen’s delicate, yearning version from the film of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, and Lady Maisery’s acapella singing with some exquisite scrunchy harmonies.

And that's the thing with folk songs. You really can make them whatever you want them to be. They are like a pizza base, or a handwriting style. You can make them as plain or as fancy as you like, add your own flavours or flourishes, but the base is still there underneath it all. The “original”, if we can call it that, printed version of the song dates to 1689, but most folk historians think it probably dates from much earlier. So, plausibly, it could well have been sung in Shakespeare’s time. It's in the genre of “warning songs”, with the play on words of “thyme” and “rue” and the implication against untrustworthy men. It was one of the first folk songs that Cecil Sharp collected in 1903, and when a lady friend of his sang it in a vicarage parlour while he played on the piano, a listener commented that it was “the first time the song had worn evening dress”. Its plaintive minor key and lilting rhythm suit the subject matter perfectly, and as you can see from the various versions I’ve shared above, it is an old song that has stood the test of time - not least because the message is more relevant than ever, given current events.

However, I wanted to link it more closely to Shakespeare, and so I decided to take the melody from Let No Man Steal Your Thyme and use it to set some words from one of the plays. A few internet searches led me to Ophelia’s Song from Hamlet:

How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon.

He is dead and gone, lady.
He is dead and gone.
At his head a grass green turf
At his heel a stone.

White his shroud as the mountain snow
Larded all with sweet flowers
Which bewept to the grave did go,
With true love showers.

Ophelia sings this, along with fragments of other folk songs, just before she goes off to drown herself, after her father’s death. So it made sense to sing this lament to a folk tune that Shakespeare himself might have known.

Emily and I agreed this back in January, and had a rehearsal where we thought about staging and harmonies. We agreed that I would sing the tune and she would weave a harmony around it (something she is very good at doing) - then we didn't really think more about it until a couple of weeks before the concert. We had a rehearsal in the church with all the other musicians and singers, performed our Sounds and Sweet Airs pieces, and then had to say, “Erm, our song’s not quite ready yet. We’ll run through it on the day.”

Rehearsing together a week later, Emily confessed she still hadn't had time to learn the words.

“That's ok,” I said. “Just sing your harmonies to ah or la, and we’ll work it out that way.”

So she did, and we realised that, actually, she didn't have to sing the words. The harmonies worked just as well, if not better, when they were wordless. It made the whole thing more atmospheric.

I’d also had some thoughts about the staging. I wanted to walk down the aisle during the first verse, carrying flowers, to help people think of the Millais or Waterhouse depictions of Ophelia’s drowning (although waiflike Pre Raphaelite Lizzie Siddall type I am most definitely not!). And then I wanted to sing the first verse of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme at the end, to enable some people to recognise where the tune came from, and to involve them actively in the “warning” element of the song by giving them some of the flowers as I walked back down the aisle. Emily and I would then end by humming the tune and harmony, to signify Ophelia drifting away from the church to the nearby river bank…

When you plan things like this in your head, there is absolutely no guarantee that they will come to fruition in the way you envisaged. But I am happy to say that I was really pleased with the performance, and from the feedback we had afterwards, the audience were too. You can see and listen for yourself here.

The whole process of adapting the song, from original inspiration to performance, took about 7 months. Each time I went back to it, to plan it out further, it was a total joy. I loved immersing myself in the minutiae of the music and the effect I wanted to provoke in the audience. In essence, this is what I do every day, every lesson, as a teacher, but primary school teaching is such a fast-paced and varied environment, it is rare to get the time to focus on one thing so deeply. And it was lovely to share my nerdy passion with Emily and feel that enthusiasm reflected back to me in manifold ways. Together, we created something special. And we will hold on to that memory for a long time to come.

Well, at least until we need to plan our next adaptation. And we're already excited about that.

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I was the last person in my immediate family, and the first person in my birth family, to get a tattoo.

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When I was growing up, in aspiring-to-middle-class suburbs of West Sussex in the 80s, tattoos were both unusual and frowned upon. With a stepfather who was an officer in the Royal Navy, I was brought up with the attitude that tattoos were only for ratings (non-officer class sailors)…and prostitutes. In fact, any kind of body adornment was a no go. I had to put up a bit of a fight to get my ears pierced at 13.

Then, when I was at university, and listening to a lot of rock and metal music, tattoos for some of my friends became a bit of a rite of passage into adulthood. My housemate Catherine got her first tattoo at this time, a black star shape which was the emblem of the band The Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was this band’s lead singer Anthony Kiedis who was one of the people popularising the newer, more abstract black tribal tattoos among festival-going crowds in the 1990s. They were not the faded, blue and green mermaids and anchors on a hairy old sailor’s arm. These felt fresh and modern, but at the same time harking back to the more ancient traditions of tattooing. Of course, cultural appropriation wasn't really a thing back then - or rather, it was, but we didn't call it that or judge it so harshly.

I liked the way the tattoo looked on my friend’s arm, and I thought it was edgy and cool. But I had no desire to have one of my own. For starters, I wasn't really a very edgy or cool person. And it just felt like something that could, later on, be seen as a mistake, just something to regret. Yes, it looks good now, but what about when you're older and - well, saggy? One of my boyfriends around this time had the cartoon child logo of the band Ugly Kid Joe tattooed, and I remember thinking even at the time that this wasn’t a band, or a logo, he’d appreciate in 20 years’ time. I’m not in touch with him now, but I’d be fascinated to see if he’s still got it, or whether he had it covered up or removed. As the 90s moved into the 2000s, the number of girls I knew coming back from Spanish holidays with “tramp stamps” - dolphins on the small of the back, roses on an ankle - increased. But this tide did not take me with it.

In 2008, when my husband turned 40, he decided to mark the occasion by getting a tattoo done. He wanted something that would represent himself, his stage in life and his family. He worked out the design carefully, elaborately, to wrap around his thigh; an ancient Icelandic design of a reindeer stag being brought down by a big cat, with two smaller reindeer beside it. The duality of himself being both predator and prey appealed to his Jungian sensibilities, and the two smaller deer represented me and my daughter. He had each of our names tattooed next to the figures in Icelandic runes. It was a large piece and had to be done in several sessions. He said it was uncomfortable rather than painful.

Again, I liked it, but had no desire to emulate him.

Then when my daughter reached 18 and was going away to university, she had her first tattoo, a star-gazing hare on her shoulder blade. This was a symbol precious to both of us - we’d previously clubbed our money together at a craft fair to buy a ceramic teapot with a Japanese star-gazing hare design, having gone back to the stall three times because we loved it so much. It reminded us that no matter how far away from each other we were, we would still be gazing at the same stars. And then in 2020, after my mother died, my daughter had a sprig of rosemary tattooed on her collarbone - both for remembrance and because Rosemary was my mother's name. I thought this was beautiful.

My daughter now has multiple tattoos and shows no signs of stopping, much to my stepfather's horror. And it's interesting that the perception of tattoos in society and in the workplace has really shifted in the last few decades. Whereas you’d commonly see hipster bar staff, musicians and clubbers with tattoos at the turn of this century, nowadays it's not unusual to see doctors, dentists, teachers and vicars all with ink on show.

When I turned 50, my daughter asked me if I’d mark the occasion by getting a tattoo of my own. And actually, for the first time, I could think of a reason to do it. A celebration of reaching half a century. Of coming into the fullness of my own feminine wisdom and power. Of using that wisdom and power to teach others not to forget about the past through my work as a teacher.

So I researched ideas that would represent this milestone, and came up with the image at the top of this article - the Athenian owl.

This was the design on the back of Athenian silver coins. Bubo, Athena’s beloved owl, was shown with a crescent moon and an olive branch - to represent peace and prosperity. Athena herself, after whom Athens was named, was the goddess of wisdom, reason and crafts such as weaving.

I also realised why the design was so familiar to me - not only because I’d studied Ancient History at A level, but because Bubo is also the delightful mechanical owl in Clash of the Titans, designed by one of my favourite animators of all time, the great Ray Harryhausen.

I made enquiries at a tattoo place near my house - it's called Needlecraft, appropriately, and specialises in making women feel comfortable and safe in the somewhat male-dominated world of tattoo art. The artist, Sharon, was delighted to create the design and after an initial consultation I booked in to get it done.

I had also researched places on the body that were the least painful to have a tattoo done, and the upper back came out top - also, it was a place that could easily be hidden by clothing, as I wasn't yet ready to flaunt my ink in the workplace.

The whole process took about an hour. Sharon sat me down and made sure I was comfortable, showed me her design, then transferred it to my skin in the same way temporary tattooes are put on. A check in the mirror to check I was happy with the placement, and then she started the tattooing process.

I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of discomfort I felt. I can best describe it as the feeling sunburn gives you, but only on one tiny part of your skin and only for a moment, then it moves on.

This is the photo Sharon took directly after it was finished, so of course the skin looks a bit sore. I was sent home with advice to keep it well moisturised, avoid soaking it for a week and, very importantly, not to pick at any scabs that occurred as the site was healing, as that can damage both your skin and the design.

I was extremely pleased with the way the design had come out, and the fact that I had it was like a secret I could hug to myself and only tell those that I chose to. It felt like what it was - a real celebration of all that I was after my 50 years on this earth. And I didn't feel the need to go back and get anything else done.

And then, last year, I read Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers In The Sky.

This is a book that is difficult to describe, but within its multi-layered, multi-timeline narrative was a modern-day character who specialises in tattooing people in cuneiform, the oldest known writing system, originating in the river valley of Mesopotamia. And it also had information about the goddess Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of food, writing, writing implements, teaching, mathematics and music.

That sounded like a goddess I could definitely relate to. But why had I never heard of her? Reading Shafak 's book, I learned that originally, all Mesopotamian scribes would etch “Praise to Nisaba” at the end of their clay tablets, to give thanks to the goddess for giving them the gift of writing. Nisaba was apparently shown in temples with a lapis lazuli tablet and a golden stylus. But, over time, her place was usurped by a male god, Nabu, and Nisaba was literally written out of both history and mythology.

Time to bring her back, I thought.

And so, for my 54th birthday, I arranged to have the cuneiform symbols for Nisaba tattooed on my right wrist, my dominant hand, so that I can see it when I’m writing or typing. The first symbol is what's called a dinghir, which means a signifier that the next symbol refers to a god or goddess. It's an eight pointed star which also symbolizes the turning of the year. The symbol for Nisaba is meant to represent a wheatsheaf being tied - Nisaba was originally a goddess of the grain harvest, and then, as city states grew and excess grain could be stored and traded, she became the goddess of the records and accounts that needed to be made.

I’m proud to have brought Nisaba out of the shadows (it's a small tattoo, but a conversation piece nonetheless). And I am very happy to have two pieces of history that I chose to carry on my skin, into whatever the future holds.

I used to be scared of making roast dinners. Making sure the meat was cooked properly, coordinating the readiness of the various side dishes, and the fact my mother made the best roast dinners on the planet, put me off for decades.

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But a few years of being my own matriarch, i.e. taking charge of the family Christmas dinner, has cured me of my reticence. It's just a question of a bit of forward planning, and the relief of knowing that you can cook many of the side dishes either in advance or in the time the meat is resting (in the oven with the heat off and the door ajar, a brilliant tip I gleaned from ).

I’ve also realized that you don't need to be feeding a crowd to find a reason to make a roast. It can be just as good - and appreciated - when cooking for two (or even for yourself, which I’ve written about before).

When my husband and I were on holiday in France over Easter, I asked him if there was anything he would like me to cook for him, and his immediate response was “cauliflower cheese”. So that would be a given for our Easter Sunday. And we had the added bonus that our holiday fridge is generally full of various cheeses. I just had to find the meat to go with it.

Lamb was not an option, as we’d already eaten the defrosted butterflied leg of lamb I’d brought over from Sainsbury's, and lamb is generally not sold in the supermarkets of the Poitou-Charentes. Limousin beef, ah oui, lamb, non. So I looked in our local Intermarché for meat to go with the planned cauliflower cheese, and ended up with a free-range, corn-fed chicken.

Whole chickens are generally sold smaller in France than they are in the UK. Our “small” chickens are approximately 1.2kg, and our “medium” 1.5kg. The average size of a roasting chicken at Intermarché was 1.3kg - so you’d need more than one to feed a crowd, but it was perfect for the two of us.

I served this with petit pois and carrots glazed with Pernod, butter and fennel seeds. The chicken was luscious, with crisp, salty, golden skin, and the potatoes I’d cooked around the bird had absorbed the lemony, garlicky juices and were sweet and tender. And the cauliflower cheese, my husband said, might have been the best he’d ever tasted. But then, he does have a delightfully goldfish-type memory when it comes to being fed…whatever he happens to be eating, if it's decent, is the best he’s ever tasted. And I have no problem with that.

Roast Chicken with Four Cheese Cauliflower Cheese

What I did was take my 1.3kg chicken, and the 30g good French butter I was going to use, out of the fridge about 40 minutes before I was going to use it, to make everything easier to work with. When I was ready to prep, I preheated the oven to 200C.

I squeezed the juice of a lemon and poured this over the chicken in its roasting tin, then stuffed a squeezed lemon half inside the carcass (I would have put both halves, but it being a narrow French ingenue of a bird, they wouldn't fit.) I also put three peeled garlic cloves and a handful of thyme sprigs inside the chicken. Then I loosened the skin over the breast with my fingers and pushed slices of butter up and under the skin and down as far as they could go without breaking the skin. I rubbed the remains of the butter on my fingers on the outside of the skin, washed my hands then seasoned the chicken with salt and pepper. I put about 8 smallish new potatoes in the pan around the chicken. It then went into the preheated oven for half an hour.

While it was cooking, I separated the florets of a medium cauliflower and boiled them in salted water until tender, about 10 minutes. I made a roux with 40g melted butter and 40g flour, and cooked it until it smelled toasty. Off the heat, I added a blend of 300g milk and 150g cream, a splash at a time, stirring furiously as it coagulated and clumped up then loosened again. Once all the liquid was incorporated I put it back on the heat and brought it to a simmer, stirring, until thickened, about 10 minutes. Once at the right saucy consistency, I added 100g soft goats cheese, 50g Emmental and 50g Comte, as well as a grating of nutmeg, a spoonful of Dijon mustard and some ground black pepper. Mine didn’t need any more salt, but adjust yours to taste.

I then put the drained cauliflower into a baking dish, draped over the gorgeous cheesy sauce, using a silicon spatula to get every last morsel of sauce out of the saucepan, and topped it with 50g grated parmesan.

Once the chicken had its first 30 minutes, I added the cauliflower cheese to the oven, reduced the heat to 180C and cooked for another half an hour. This should mean both dishes will be ready at the same time, but if they’re not, you can always remove one until the other is done.

Once the chicken was roasted and the juices ran clear, and the cauliflower cheese was golden brown and bubbling, I turned the oven off and left both dishes in the oven with the door slightly ajar for 15 minutes. I find the chicken meat relaxes properly in the residual heat, much better than being taken out into the cold and then covered with foil. It also solves the problem of condensation making the chicken skin go soggy. The cauliflower cheese will also be far less likely to take the roof of your mouth off after a rest. During the resting time. I got on with cooking some petits pois from the freezer and cooking some glazed carrots, just cooked in the minimum amount of water necessary to stop them burning, then glazed with a splash of Pernod and rolled around in a nugget of salted butter and a spoonful of fennel seeds on a low heat for a minute or two until glossy.

Serve it all up. Carve the chicken at the table and pour over some of the gorgeous, lemony pan juices.

I’d love you to make this and enjoy it as much as we did.

I’d also really like to know your opinion on the recipe format - do you prefer this, which is more chatty but less traditionally organised (and less likely to come up in an online search), or the format of my previous post, which uses the newer Substack recipe formatting? Or don't you mind either way? Let me know in the comments. And have a beautiful Sunday, whatever you’re doing. Me, I’m off to sing some Elizabethan music in the oldest church in Shoreham by Sea. Speak to you soon!

It was Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress who played the original Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, who famously referred to wedlock as “the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly burly of the chaise longue.” It was a phrase that kept rolling around in my head last week as I sat in the garden in France, listening to the bee-loud glade of the fruit trees after which the house - Les Vergers - was named, and the myriad little birds in the bushes and barn rooftops around me. This was, indeed, the deep, deep peace of the French countryside after the hurly burly of term time, and it was exactly the restorative space that my husband and I both needed.

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All week, after an uneventful ferry crossing and a five hour journey south from Caen, we slept, woke with the light, pottered during the day, wandered around the garden and the surrounding hamlet, sat and talked and planned and played board games in the evenings. And we ate really, really well.

I’ve written before about my tips for self catering in France when travelling by car - the most successful of which continues to be bringing with me a butterflied leg of lamb from Sainsbury's which I freeze, then use as a giant ice pack to keep other things cool on the journey. For several years now, and across multiple seasons, it's formed the basis of our first proper meal on day 2 of the holiday, usually as kebabs, where I marinate the meat very simply with sliced onions, olive oil, seasoning and lemon juice.

After our trip to the local Intermarché, I was also lucky enough to find some ultra-seasonal, locally grown white asparagus, which I griddled along with some huge spring onions to serve alongside salmon fillets I’d topped with red pepper pesto and a bit of “everything bagel” seasoning (so not in the least bit French, but totally delicious).

My stepfather, who owns the property, had given us bags of stuff to take to France with us, including some laundered bedding and towels we’d brought home last summer, a stash of empty Bon Maman jars ready for making mirabelle jam next time we come, and a collection of Saturday Telegraph magazines for me to peruse, because he knows I like the Diana Henry food pages.

I spent a happy hour going through these issues, dating back to before Christmas, and found several recipes I wanted to try, including one from January for a “breakfast strata” which sounded like it might be ideal for a self catering meal in France.

I’d never heard of a strata before, and because our French house is in a weird Internet black spot, I had to wait until I was back in the UK to look it up. Essentially, it's a bit like a savoury bread and butter pudding. The name comes from the layers of bread and other ingredients as they sit in the liquid and bake. Strata is an American invention, dating back to 1902 but popularised in the 1984 Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook by Julie Rosso and Sheila Lukins.

Diana Henry's breakfast strata follows the pattern of the multiple variants I looked up online once I was home. Hers contains sausage, grain mustard and spinach. She says that any type of bread can be used, and because it sits in the liquid for so long before being baked, you don't need to remove the crusts. This made me think it would be perfect to use up the baguettes that, in their inimitable French way, start to go stale after a day.

However, I had to make some adaptations. Baby spinach is not really a thing in this part of France at this time of year, unless you buy it frozen. Unlike in the UK, where bags of baby spinach leaves are available all year round in the salad aisle alongside watercress and rocket, in France the default dark green leaf of choice is always mâche (lambs lettuce). Mâche doesn't have the depth of flavour of spinach, but I reckoned it would do the job pretty well. And then, of course, I could call it a sausage and mâche strata in a fit of Nigella-esque wordplay…

I also found, when I got home (quelle horreur!) that we didn't have the grain mustard Diana had specified in the cupboard. So I substituted it for Dijon and it all worked beautifully.

When I make it again in France, which I absolutely will, I may well try it with the merguez sausages that are so popular over there, which will add a North African flavour and colour to the dish - and in the UK, it would also be good made with cooking chorizo.

It's a dish that lends itself to a quiet, lazy, pottering holiday, because you can make it in advance, leave it while you read a book or go for a walk or even overnight, and then bake it when you’re ready. And leftovers, if there are any, reheat really well in a low oven, covered in foil.

Let me know what you think if you try this - it's such an adaptable dish. I hope your Easter was everything you wanted it to be. Next time, I’ll share with you the roast chicken and epic four cheese cauliflower cheese I made on Easter Sunday - a feast!

You can’t work in a primary school for as long as I have (31 years and counting) without becoming well versed in facts about dinosaurs. Not a week goes by when I’m not asked to ajudicate in such pressing questions as “Who would win in a fight between a T Rex and a giganotosaurus?” (Answer: neither, because these two apex predators lived in different time periods). I taught a child a few years ago who was so obsessed with the fictional hybrid Indominus Rex from Jurassic World that he wrote endless film scripts with “Indy” as the main character (often wearing sunglasses and spouting comedy lines). But the fascination children have with dinosaurs and their comparative stats predates the Jurassic Park franchise, just as it predates Pokémon (1990s) or even Top Trumps cards (1970s). In fact, it makes me quite sad that, despite several revamps, the primary curriculum does not explicitly teach anything about dinosaurs. But that’s never stopped the perennial fascination with these ancient monsters, or the significant minority of children in my classes each year who tell me that their ambition is to be, not a footballer or a You Tube un-boxer, but a paleontologist.

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Paleontology really took off in the Victorian era, and the word “dinosaur” (from the Greek for “terrible lizard”) dates from around 1841. The life size (and, we now know, wildly inaccurate) statues of dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park were put there in the 1850s, predating the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.

The first children's books on dinosaurs were published around the same time, with metal dinosaur toys appearing in the early 1900s. Authors such as Jules Verne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle continued the fascination with these real life monsters in their fiction, and even Charles Dickens mentions them in the opening of Bleak House. There were a couple of short animated dino films from the early 20th century, and then 1925’s The Lost World started a chain of dinosaur epics that would eventually lead to that iconic wobbling glass of water in the first Jurassic Park film.

And now we have a brand new “documentary” as it’s billed, on Netflix, allegedly “the first of its kind”, although I think the BBC and David Attenborough might have a few things to say about that.

In four episodes, narrated by the Voice of God, aka Morgan Freeman, this Netflix programme takes us from the origin of the dinosaurs (Freeman gleefully pronounces it “DINE-sauuurrr” like a Deep South version of George from Peppa Pig) to the asteroid (sorry, “asterooooooiiiiiid”) that most paleontologists agree caused their fall.

It's a very well made series. Evidently a lot of money has been spent on the cinematography, the sweeping scenery and the faultlessly realistic CGI. But I have - issues with it.

Which is not to say I didn't find it fascinating. It begins 235 million years ago, in the Triassic, when what we know as the modern continents were one great land mass - Pangaea. I remembered this from my GCSE Science about tectonic plates, and have always enjoyed looking at the Mercator world map and visualising how the jigsaw puzzle of the continents originally fit together.

This was the time of the ancient reptiles, animals I knew very little about before watching, but which turned out to be just as fascinating and scary as actual dinosaurs. There’s an exciting beachfront death race between marasuchus (a pigeon-sized proto dinosaur) and reptile apex predator luperosuchus, akin to the racer snake/ marine iguana race in David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II. And at the end of the first episode, we get a sneak peek at possibly my favourite recently discovered dinosaur, Yutyrannus (“the Snow Kaaaannngg,” Morgan tells me), an ancestor of the ubiquitous T-Rex, but with clear evidence in the fossil record of feathers, which could have been for camouflage as well as warmth.

I also learned that dinosaurs (at least, some of them) were warm blooded, like birds, rather than cold blooded like reptiles, so they could move around and find food at night - I had never really thought about this.

There are some mind-blowing facts about the time periods involved, too. I learned about the Carnian Pluvial Event, which the record in rocks and soil tells us was more than a million years of rain. Despite all our moans about the state of the weather since last October, the wettest winter on record, my brain can’t hold this information and process it properly. A MILLION years. Of rain. A MILLION!

But about midway through the first episode, I hit a wall. They were depicting pterosaur breeding grounds. Two toothy pterosaurs were engaged in a bowing, swaying, beak clicking courtship ritual. “During these rituals, the pterosaurs are focussed entirely on each other, not on their surroundings. Which can be costly. Because dinosaurs dwell in these canyons,” Freeman murmurs.

“How do they know pterosaurs had mating rituals?” I asked my husband.

“How do they know? They don’t. It’s pure speculation, based on modern bird behaviour,” he replied.

And, of course, I knew this. The use of mating rituals in pterosaurs is a theory. Probably well researched and published in a PhD thesis somewhere. But a theory nonetheless.

This is pure speculation, presented as fact. With a well known, authoritative narrative voice. On a well-respected TV network “documentary” watched by millions worldwide. In order to make a compelling narrative.

It’s that kind of jarring juxtaposition of established fact from the fossil record and theoretical positioning that makes a person like me curious, and sceptical, because I know a bit about how paleontology works, and I actually like fact checking. But other people may watch it and take in everything as factual, because it’s billed as a documentary.

The makers of The Dinosaurs are, whether they realise it or not, encouraging a generation of passive consumers who question nothing and believe everything they see. Which, in this age of AI deepfakes, and billionaire playboys and politicians who fully believe they are above the law and can doctor the truth to suit themselves, is incredibly disturbing.

There are several of these scenes where the narrative skips over the fact that we just don’t know whether dinosaurs behaved or looked the way they are presented here. It would have been the work of moments for the scriptwriters to acknowledge the speculative nature of what is presented and the context in which the theories are made. “We think this group of sauropods tried the migrate south, because their fossilised remains were all found together” for example; “Yutyrannus probably had variegated black and white feathers to act as camouflage in a snowy environment”, or “Paleontologists believe pterosaur mating rituals may have looked like those of modern birds”. I can even imagine Morgan Freeman saying these with the requisite gravitas. But no. Each time, these scenarios are presented, without question, as fact. Because when when did programme makers ever let fact-checking get in the way of a compelling narrative?

Complaining about this makes me feel a bit Cassandra-like, because it's clear from the reviews the show has garnered that other people are just not that bothered about it the same way I am. And it is hard to make the conceptual leap from a bit of narrative glossing on The Dinosaurs to Donald Trump telling the world that the innocent victims of attacks by ICE agents were dangerous terrorists. But the connection is there nonetheless. And I feel the need to make a stand on it. Because, as Alexander Hamilton famously tells Aaron Burr, “if you stand for nothing, what’ll you fall for?”

I had two antidotes to this televisual existential gloom. First, I watched Louis Theroux In The Manosphere, a documentary where nobody needed to flag up the speculative parts because Theroux, by calmly asking questions and allowing space for his subjects to talk at length, got them to reveal themselves for exactly what they were - at best, scared little boys with mother wounds, and at worst, conmen who’d realised that outrage fuels the algorithm, and pays. The truth comes out in plain sight. Well worth a watch.

And secondly, going out into the sunshine and spotting my favourite thing about March - the magnolias coming into bloom. Magnolia blossom is the earliest form of flower - so ancient that it predates bees; the trees need beetles to pollinate. They date from the Cretaceous period, so would have been around in the time of dinosaurs, and, unlike them, survived several mass extinctions. Now there’s a happy ending I can fact check and appreciate.

The news is unremittingly awful; the weather, after a few, vanishingly rare days of blue skies and the hint of warmth, has gone back this weekend to gloomy monochrome bleakness. Although I notice the magnolias have performed their annual magic trick of transforming from bare branches to blooming beauty seemingly overnight. So there’s that.

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Over the last few weeks, in between choir rehearsals and choir concerts and recipe testing and work and work prep and catching up on the Substack TBR pile, I’ve been distracting myself by watching some really good quality television. The sort that takes me away from day to day stress, makes me laugh and makes me think. So I thought I'd share a few with you, in case you are also in need of some welcome distraction from doom scrolling. These are programmes that will genuinely make you put your phones down and focus.

The Night Manager (BBC iPlayer)

I missed out on this the first time round for some reason, so have watched both seasons on iPlayer back to back. The first, an adaptation of a John Le Carré novel, is a big budget, glamorous travelogue that moves with the beautiful people (read: moneyed criminal types and the spies who love them) from Egypt to Switzerland to Majorca and back again. Furrow-browed thinking woman’s crumpet Tom Hiddleston is Jonathan Pine, a soldier turned eponymous hotel night manager turned reluctant spy, recruited by Olivia Coleman playing a surprisingly realistic bluff, Northern, grumpy, heavily pregnant spymaster(mistress). The baddies you’ll love to hate are headed by the suavely charismatic Hugh Laurie as an amoral crime baron, Tom Hollander as his chaotic, camp, alcoholic right hand man and Elizabeth Debicki as the luminous and enigmatic (or maybe vacuous?) Jed, the gangster’s moll. Hiddleston does that Bond-esque thing of falling for the beautiful women (plural) even when it is literally the most dangerous thing he could do; there are the traditional number of car chases, close shaves and gun fights; Hiddleston and Laurie get to do Proper Acting with Great Lines and Real Tension in a variety of glamorous locations; and in the end, the plucky British spy team manage to defeat the criminals and Save The Girl (spoilers).

So far, so standard spy drama. But the second season, filmed 9 years after the original, moves away from Le Carré’s original novel and goes its own way. And arguably is all the better for it.

It was a bit of a jolt moving from the end of the first season to the beginning of the second, mostly because Hiddleston's hairline has receded so much he’s gone from smouldering babe to small town bank manager, in the manner of the singer songwriter James Taylor…

The first couple of episodes are set in a London so grey and office-based, you wonder when the glamorous locations are going to kick in. But then they do, and we’re away, watching the ever-expanding brow becoming increasingly furrowed as Hiddleston battles not only against the international criminals and the British government operatives covertly supporting them, but against his own desires.

Because, excitingly, for me at least, this season has barely-suppressed queer energy that feels far more authentic than Jonathan Pine’s hetero liaisons in Season 1. The smouldering sexual tension between Hiddleston and Diego Calva as drug baron Teddy is ever-present, although barely referred to, which makes it all the more compelling. And the stand-off scenes between Hiddleston and Laurie (at a hilltop steak restaurant in Colombia) are a great bit of Lenten viewing, coming off like the temptation of Christ in the desert, with Laurie as such a persuasive Devil you’re almost willing them to join forces in a bit of organised crime. What's even more Lenten about it is that they are so busy doing Proper Acting with Great Lines and Real Tension that they DON’T EVEN GET TO EAT THE BLOODY STEAKS (I was shouting at the screen, “Eat the steak! Eat the steak! You might be dead soon!”.)

There's also the brilliant Indira Varma, who has a track record in playing characters who scheme and machinate and mask (cf Game of Thrones and the incomparable Rome) having a great time on screen as a posh, British thoroughly Bad Egg.

Be warned, the ending is unexpectedly bleak, but a third series has already been commissioned, so who knows which of the characters will have unexpectedly survived? Or where their hairlines will be?

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Sky Atlantic)

As previously mentioned, I was, and remain, a massive fan of Game of Thrones. I was absolutely riveted by the first season, and then bought the book, curious about the source material but thinking the dialogue couldn't possibly be as good as the script. What I had failed to appreciate was that George R R Martin was a screenwriter before he became a novelist, and that the dialogue was all there in the books, just waiting to be acted out. I was hooked. Over the years, my reading ran ahead of the TV series, meaning that I was increasingly disappointed by both the programme and the lack of a publication (or even completion) date of The Winds of Winter, the final novel, as the scripts moved further and further away from the source material towards a conclusion that pleased no-one.

The first GOT spin-off, House of the Dragon, looked promising, but I eventually stopped watching it, because, although it had all the fantasy and Machiavellian political wrangling of its predecessor, it had precisely none of the humour. It wasn't only bleak, it was boring.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was originally published as “Dunk and Egg”, a novella, and a friend of mine, Antony, who is also a GOT fan, found it online as an ebook before it was published and downloaded it for me years ago. So I knew the characters and storyline and really hoped the producers were going to make a good job of it.

And the good news is that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is an utter joy. Its two main characters, Ser Duncan The Tall (Peter Claffey) and his erstwhile squire Egg (Dexter Sol), are so perfectly cast that every time they are on screen they just make me beam with delight. The episodes are only around 30 minutes long, so they always leave you wanting more, like a good teacher reading to the class (“oh, you always stop at the good bits!”). And the programme sets out its stall from the outset, when the death of a hedge knight and the opening notes of the Game of Thrones theme are abruptly cut to a shot of Dunk defecating under a tree. House of the Dragon this is not. It is overtly bawdy, boisterous and very, very funny, whilst still having the gravitas of the Game of Thrones original when the plot requires.

This series is set nearly 100 years before the time of Jon Snow and Danaerys Targaryen - a bit like setting it during the Wars of the Roses rather than the Elizabethan era - and the full-blooded (in every sense) jousting sequences at the tourney are at times reminiscent of the 1977 Terry Gilliam film Jabberwocky. But for every gruesomely filmed lance wound, you get equal amounts of humour. Especially any time Daniel Ings comes on screen as the generous spirited and perenially inebriated Lyonel Baratheon - surely the best GOT character since Tyrion Lannister (who George R R Martin has said was based on himself).

I’ve watched each episode at least twice now and they just get better with repeated viewing. Again, a second season has been commissioned and I can't wait.

Small Prophets (BBC iPlayer)

I can't say anything about this absolute gem of a series that and haven't already said, and to discuss it too much is to spoil the magic (and I’m talking real as well as metaphorical magic here) for those who haven't seen it yet. Mackenzie Crook, who created and appears in it, is an absolute genius at showing on screen the beauty in the banal and the mystery in the mundanity of British small town life. He did it with Detectorists and, again, brilliantly and differently, here. There are scenes that made me roll on the floor laughing and others that were so tender they left me speechless. No more - if you haven't yet, just watch it. Lucky, lucky you, being able to experience it for the first time!

Younger (Netflix)

I’ve only just started this one, but pretty much the entirety of my Gourmet Girls group when we met on Thursday implored me to watch it, so I’m including it here. Apparently it is the very definition of bingeable, as the episodes are only 20 minutes long (so there's always time for just one more…). Filmed between 2015 and 2021, there are seven seasons. The premise is a woman in her 40s, newly single and having taken time out of her editing job to raise a child, has to pretend to be 26 to be able to get a job. So far (I’m only two episodes in) it's like a mash up of The Devil Wears Prada with Sex and the City with a smattering of Girls (Lena Dunham is name checked in the first episode - “Who’s Lena Dunham?” says our 40-something protagonist, who passes no vibe checks). Apparently it's “blown up” on Netflix recently, because people want a slice of “2010s nostalgia” (!!). Now, that really does say something about the state of the world. I’m looking forward to finding out more.

And a final note…

The Walsh Sisters on iPlayer. Do not go near it. Whether or not you’ve read the source material (Marian Keyes’ novels), you don't expect something billed as a comedy drama to be so very lacking in comedy and full of turmoil. The novels are heart warming, life affirming Irish fiction. The series is - Irish fiction. Read this review and then stick to the books.