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.
i have come to love the observer, particularly the food monthly supplement. my friend michael just brought me a real hard copy of it which i devoured (not literally of course : ) ) hungrily. so much better than reading it on-line. you mention mfk fisher and arabella boxer, both of whom i have heard much of but never read. can you recommend some good starting points?
Posted by: kitschenette | Friday, 16 July 2004 at 05:48 PM
No mention of the lovely Nigella or the handsome Nigel? I saw Nigel Slater walking down the street and he is surprisingly tall and slim. This was an excellent piece of writing. Why are you not getting paid for doing this?
Anne
Posted by: Anne | Sunday, 18 July 2004 at 08:16 PM