anyresemblance

A price beyond rubies

I am clearly being punished for skiving at work this afternoon and writing an entry which I now seem to have lost. I'd like to tell you it was a lost masterpiece now just a few elusive fragments scattered in the bytes but it was rather some tiresome gushing best restricted to my closest girlfriends. If I tell you that my boss is currently overseas for two weeks it will explain some of this idling. Mind you, Monday was hell since he had spent 18 hours cramped on a plane with time to think and stew and called us all in quick succession with a series of GOOD IDEAS that were nothing but and which were mostly duly ignored as are most of the brighter inspirations of senior management. Yesterday I went to an annual dinner of a local women's network organisation. It was in the Botanic Gardens, possibly inspirational in summer but bloody freezing on a July night in Canberra. They had those cafe heaters which boil your head but leave your feet like ice. The food was predictably dire and the guest speaker - who I know to be an interesting woman - lost her head and spoke for more than an hour. I lost count of how many times she said I and me and busied myself by planning how I could stage a diversion and effect a quick getaway. Despite only a couple of glasses of wine I had a shocking night's sleep and spent most of today feeling distinctly seedy. Tonight was season finale to Charmed and now we ponder how our family bonding will continue on Thursday nights. My boss called me at 8:25 - this probably isn't a good time, he said. I did the "Alan, the line's so bad, it's breaking up" trick and he let me go. I love this list of things children need to be taught from small hands. How to make a bed How to floss their teeth How to cook Geometry How to sew How to use a cordless drill How to mop a floor How to pitch a tent How to operate the washing machine and dryer Reading Writing Addition Subtraction Spanish Geography Manners I've added some of my own: How to feed a pet How to phone for the police, ambulance or fire brigade How to read a bus timetable and a map Miss I wanted to make bread tonight. She was devastated that the library book she had chosen today at school was about the life of a baker but contained no recipes. We made bread from a Jamie Oliver recipe. We talked about gluten and the magic as the dough becomes silky in your hands.

No comment

I'm such a slacker at the moment. Something good has happened that I ain't writing about here but which has me a bit distracted from the on-line world. I saw Kasey Chambers on Thursday night. She a great live performer, comes over totally natural and is adored by her fans. There were many kids in the audience but not me - I've taken my kids to Byron Bay festival and we listen to a lot of music at home and in the car and they listen to heaps with their father but I've learned they have a short attention plan for sitting still. I love Kasey and actually learned to listen to Lucinda Williams via her which is probably desperately unhip of me but who cares. Friday night I went to drinks after work which was a bit of a rarity for me but someone newish who I really like asked me to come. I was glad I did and had a really interesting talk with her about totally unexpected subjects and met a couple of new women. Then I went to meet another friend and saw the Stepford Wives. What a bloody awful movie. I can't think of anything I liked about it except the fact that it seemed to be over in about 20 minutes. The rest of the weekend has been peaceful and quite dull. Suits me fine.

Forgive me this momentary lapse in good humour

Just when I think I have reached a rapprochement with the father of my children something happens to make me despair of ever being able to properly communicate. This is only a reprise of something that happens often but it's put me off my stride for most of the day. I learned in the course of the exchange of e-mails with my step-son that his father is going to China on Saturday. When I thought my girls were going there for the weekend and I had made various plans. I don't know how we get this on an even keel since every strategy seems to get undermined. We've tried writing down a calendar - I have the piece of paper that says he is in Melbourne this week (he's in Sydney) and that he leaves from Beijing on Sunday (now it's 7am on Saturday). I guess at the bottom of my frustration is a resentment that I am the one who is always so infinitely flexible and that if I push back it makes it seem like I don't want to spend time with my children. Plus, I had made grown-up plans for Friday night and I now have to pay a baby-sitter. Sigh.

Consider the oyster

I've not been writing much this week, mostly because I have been enjoying the company of my children and doing stuff with them. Back to the factory for all of us tomorrow. It's been a quietly domestic week. I have cooked a lot. Yesterday I made the boston cream pie. It was pretty easy - even making creme patissiere which is normally the sort of thing that has me frantic that I'll end up with a saucepan of scrambled eggs (as after all, I did manage to burn a saucepan of spaghetti oops tonight). I think I should have poured the chocolate ganache on sooner as it did not gracefully drip over the sides as in the picture but it tastes pretty yummy and I am currently converted to plainish Victoria sponges. I also made bread and added some polenta to see if I could get that yellow wheaten effect of Irish flour but it tastes like grit so obviously that ain't it. Miss S and I went to see King Arthur on Friday morning. What a load. Still, she loved the horses (natch) and the Xena like garb of Guinevere. My favourite line "I am a Roman officer, you're safe now". Friday night I went to a fundraiser cocktail party at the Library. Since they are a client of ours I considered this a company expense and obligation. The sponsor was Paspaley pearls and man, those pearls were divine. There was a big cabinet of fabulous necklaces and ear-rings and a very weedy looking security man. Paspaley are currently featured in the recent acquisitions of the Library which includes some beautiful pearls from their first harvest in the 1950s, golden and lustrous. The chair of the library council, who introduced the proceedings, is Sir James Gobbo. Unfortunately, I can not escape the image of the naughty goblins from the Noddy stories, Sly and Gobbo, and fully expected to see him rubbing his hands together gleefully over a bag of stolen sixpences. Still, it was a cut above Enid Blyton, moet champagne and the best canapes I had ever eaten - green apple muffins with blue cheese souffle topping; blue eye cod wrapped in vine leavs with a coriander dipping sauce; rare lamb fillet, quince paste on a kataifa base. I regret I did not win the door prize but I thought my own grey tahitian pearls measured up to those on display. Anne asked why I didn't mention Nigella and Nigel in my last post. I do cook from Nigella's books but I think she is a better writer about eating than she is about cooking. She used to write a restaurant column in the Spectator years ago, in those days her brother was way more famous than she as the young editor of the Speccie, and I enjoyed her writing more then than her celebrity prose of today. I always like Nigel Slater but I notice I only have his stuff from the Sainsbury magazines not his newspaper writing. Kitschenette asked me about Arabella Boxer. I think her best book is out of print though I don't think it's hard to get hold of a copy - A Visual Feast with photographs by Tessa Traeger. This is a collection of her Vogue pieces but arranged around the months of the years. The photos are stunning - still lives, most of them. It's one of my favourite pieces of bed time reading. I also have her Herb Book (also out of print, I think) which is also excellent. I have a very old paperback copy of MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating, which was published by Picador with an intro by WH Auden. It includes Consider the Oyster (fitting given my current pearl obsession) and the Gastronimical Me. The latter includes her 1936 essay, Define This Word, which is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read.

Strictly typing

I've been pondering the manual typewriter today. A friend wrote to say that her holiday book choices were being vetoed by one of her travelling companions as he contended that she only read typing. I love the sound of a typewriter - it seems to convey industriousness, after all the point of most office work is to look busy and nothing does that better than the clacking and ting of a manual typewriter. I've been having a delightfully slothful week. I answered a mysterious "private number" call on my mobile this afternoon. "hello, anyresemblance, this is Toby from SuperTalentQuest . Do you have time to talk?". I told him I was having my nails done and he asked me what colour. This seemed remarkably flirtatious for someone who'd only known me for 15 seconds but such are the ways of the recruitment industry. Anyway, he softened me up by telling me that I was highly recommended to me by a former colleague but when he told me who, my heart sank. My recommender is someone who ran up huge expenses and won no business and walked before he was sacked. Someone who is so clearly full of shit that you'd think this guy would have seen right through him - given that he didn't appear to have made me question his judgement, right? Anyway, this job is pretty high profile but, as ever, I can think of the 3 things that don't qualify me instead of the 27 ones which do. The girls have been having a good week, too. They have both had activities every day which have kept them away from each other and I have been enjoying the one on one time with each of them. Tonight, Miss I has gone for a sleepover and Miss S and I ate thai takeaway and watched Charmed. Miss S went to an art workshop today and made a great Alice in Wonderland diorama. I had a home office organising day and did 6 months worth of filing and started my tax return (desperate cash flow issue). I also organised all the cut out recipes in my file by putting them in those plastic wallets. I was about 16 when I started cutting recipes out of newspapers and magazines. Although I learned a heap about cooking from my mother she had some strong opinions on food - she didn't like pasta or lamb, she boiled vegetables to surrender and believed all meat should be well done. I learned about food mostly from reading and the recipes I cut out chart my culinary history. At 16, there were a lot of desserts and what I guess would be described as dinner party food. At university I was a complete food snob and despised the student attempts at spaghetti bolognaise or chilli or 100 other appalling things to do with cheap mince. Instead, I shopped in Marks and Spencer's food hall and lived on deli salads. But it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I really learned to cook. In sorting through all the recipes it was interesting to see the different hand writing on scraps of paper of things I'd eaten with friends and family that they had then given me the recipe for. I think the oldest thing in the file is for Diane's Christmas Pudding which is from my sister who is custodian of the family recipe. There's my sister's chocolate sauce pudding from when I was 16, my oldest daughter's favourite, much stained with cocoa. Then there is a recipe for bagels which I ate at the house of a friend in Nebraska in 1983. I understand she is now a professor at smart east coast college but I lost touch with her a long time ago. On some pink filofax paper I have a recipe for soda bread which I think might be from Anne's sister, Tricia. This has been my culinary failure. I have never managed to recreate the yellow fleck you get in the wheaten bread in Ireland. I've pondered if I should add some cornmeal but I haven't crakced it yet. There's the chicken with preserved lemons and olives that Jacqui gave me. I have her giant jar that she preserved lemons in which she bequeathed to me 6 years ago when she went to London. She's been back about 18 months but I still have the jar. I notice there is a lot of stuff clipped from the Observer which shaped a lot of my food thinking and Vogue when Arabella Boxer was food editor. I've said this before, but she is woefully underpraised as a food writer. I read her before I ever read Elizabeth David, in fact reading her led me to Claudia Roden, Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher. There's stuff from Jennifer Patterson when she was at the Spectator and Sophie Grigson at the Independent. I have nothing clipped from Australian newspapers. I don't know if this is because the advent of food magazines has meant that the weekly press has little new to offer in food writing or if there just isn't anything worth reading but I still look to Arabella Boxer for the artless combination of social history, sustainable farming, effortless prose and quiet promotion of good food, simply prepared and eaten with pleasure.

Coconut, coconut, coconut, crack

I'm on holiday this week which means that I only field a few calls and read my e-mail twice a day. The only way to really be on holiday is to be out of mobile range and unable to access e-mail. Yesterday my children came home for which I was very thankful. They had a wonderful time and love the farm and the horses but I am glad to have them back in my arms. Last night I finished Birds of a Feather happy to know that they were sleeping under my roof again. Today Miss I went to a craft workshop held in the school hall across the road and Miss S and I spent the day together. We went to get a quote for carpet. I have not bought carpet since 1992 when I carpeted the bedroom in my North London flat so I am a bit daunted by this but they gave me samples to take home and look at in different lights. We were only 21 minutes in the shop but Miss S pronounced this to be 16 minutes too long. Then we went off to the shopping centre to buy her socks - she is going to a birthday party where the dress code is wild socks - and a present for her friend. She chose a ring from Sportsgirl and a decorative chain for her friend's mobile phone. Neither of my kids have mobiles though it's under consideration for Miss S once she starts taking the bus to school. When we got home we decided to make a cake. My suggestion of Boston Cream Pie was over-ruled for Nigella Lawson's coconut cake. It wasn't difficult but it's pretty boring despite copious amounts of malibu in the recipe. It looks good but I dunno, coconut cake doesn't really taste of much at all. I'm sulking about the Boston Cream Pie. We lit the fire tonight and the children taught me to play spoons. I allowed myself to be beaten. If any adults were present I would have played to the death but I am not so competitive as to cause a scene at bed-time.

The raven haired sleuth

I got a stache of books from Amazon today including the newly recommended to me Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. I read it this afternoon and evening and I highly, highly recommend it. It combines all my favourite feisty heroine sleuth, between the wars, below the stairs stuff. Nancy Drew meets Mma Ramotswe. Very thoughtfully written with a character with a lot of potential for interesting situations. I have the next one in the series also which is tomorrow's treat. I got my wires crossed on return of my children today - plans were constantly changing since their father was supposed to be going to NZ next week. I was expecting their return from Cooma and watching the clock tick by. The route is out of mobile range and I getting more and more worried. Eventually I discovered they were still there and I just lost it with their father on the phone. I was crying hysterically on the phone since i had rehearsed every possibility of death on that road and I still feel angry that he hadn't called me to say they were staying there - even if he believed they were staying with him tonight. He seemed genuinely sorry but it reminded me again of how oblivious he often is to the feelings of others. I may be sideswiped by the amount of medication I have taken in the last 24 hours. I am on a new regime for treating my migraines. I think I have been underdosing pain in early stages which then leads to muscular tension and the whole of my back and neck seizing up. The new medication seems pretty effective but none of it addresses why they arise in the first place. I recognise some triggers but others - like tiredness and stress - are harder to manage. I did go to an excellent Pilates session at 7:30 am and then had a massage. Took my filthy car to the car wash which oddly also eased my headache. I don't think I am Martha Stewart but I do get stressed by clutter and mess so it was nice to drive around in a clean car. This afternoon I made the meatloaf from here via small hands. I got to tell you it is divine and perfect food for a cold night but I have the feeling it will also be great cold and may feature in summer buffets.

Charmless

It's been bloody freezing all day, I've had a bad headache and I miss my children. I watch the temperatures in Cooma and worry that I haven't packed enough warm clothes for them. I was looking forward to watching and taping Charmed tonight in their honour but it's been put off for a Big Brother Live Eviction. Grrr. And no L Word last night because of the State of Origin. Double grrr. I had lunch today with a former colleague who has been going through a vile marriage break-up. I mean just awful, awful stuff. This woman's life has been a car crash and she looked like she was struggling to hold it together. This is someone whose parents refused to watch her two older children while she went into hospital to have the third - she had to pay a babysitter. She's emerging from the wreckage but she looked dreadful. I am so lucky to have great kids with a father who puts them first, good friends, good family and financial security.

Chief Apologist, Regret Management Unit

Started the day meeting one of the women at work that I mentor on the steps of the Library only to discover the cafe wasn't open. Repaired to Kingston for plan 2 and drank good coffee and listened to her. Pondered over why the business just isn't offering enough to keep bright, young women. Went into the office to be berated by Person From Procurement who was worried I had committed to something unseemly on my trip to Melbourne. Explained that the sub-contractor we usually use had signed exclusive agreement with someone else and though this was inconvenient it was not adultery and he was not the wronged husband. Got someone else in to mediate the meeting since I was at.the.end.of.my.tether. Went out to meeting at another clients which required me to walk through the perfume hall of David Jones. Squirted myself liberally with new Stella perfume by Stella McCartney. I like it. Signed contract for significant dollar amount to do something quirky and interesting. Wrote modest e-mail of self-congratulation to big boss. Instant messaged his off-sider crowing in an unseemly fashion about my skills and talents for achieving this in first week of new quarter. Ate avocado and tomato sandwich for lunch. Wrote letter of weasel words to customer outlining that we would do a modicum of free work but thereafter I would expect her to pay lavishly for our services. Filled in a third of a feedback survey for my boss going on, ahem, accelerated leadership training. It suggested "you may wish to print your responses for future reference" - and run the risk of him discovering what I answered to the question "Does Mr X remain calm in a crisis"? Phoned up another client to discover why we had been unsuccesful in a tender. After several abortive attempts to contact each other, got the following. "We got 69 responses. Yours was in the bottom third. You demonstrated no understanding of our business or our requirements." Well, that explains it then. Then he asked me if I'd like to have coffee with him. I thought this very odd since to my knowledge we have never met but it then transpired that he is looking to leave the public service and wondered if we might have any vacancies. Sigh, so now despite the stuff up, I have to drive to Tuggeranong to drink vile coffee with this man.

Piece of cake

Inspired by Lucinda's not one, but two creative birthday cakes, my own children have been discussing what cake for this year. Their respective birthdays are 5 to 6 months off you understand but they go in for long term planning for their birthday celebrations. I sometimes wonder if wedding planners should be on their list of career choices. I have had my share of disasters - the year Miss S requested a cake that looked like a beautifully wrapped present I tinted the icing a delicate pale pink, unfortunately it was a cheap colour and by morning the cake looked more like something wrapped in cheap brown paper since the colour had gone off. Or the year she wanted the cakes like individual houses with chocolate roof tiles - it was 30 at 11pm the night before as her father and I tried to get the bloody tiles on without the chocolate melting all over our fingers. Then there was the year she chose the wildy ambitious "bush babies" cake from the Australian Women's Weekly Fantastic Cakes book and my pal, Karen, was co-opted to fashion possums, koalas, wombats and gum leaves from fondant icing. "It's easy to make an authentically Australian menagerie" trilled the instructions. Well, only when you ply your best friend with lots of wine and beg her to stay and assist. Actually, they were all delightful in the end but much effort went into their execution.