Bread and beyond

Obsessive? moi?

When we first got back to the UK I had great difficulty getting used to the bread.  It never seemed to taste of anything.  Even the Old Town bakery Judges didn't really seem to hit the spot (I've had to change my views since - I was feeling pretty negative at the start about a lot of things.)  This is no good, I thought.  I'll have to get back to baking it myself.

The joiner working on our windows, Ollie Adams, turned out to be a baker's son.  He recommended Dan Lepard's recent book Short and Sweet, subtitled "The Best of Home Baking", and I set to.  My mission was interrupted after a week or two when Paul visited a Chinese doctor in Hastings and was told to stop eating any yeast.  My subsequent attempts at soda bread were far from brilliant: even following Dan Lepard's recipes it turned out a bit too heavy for comfort.  Undeterred, I looked at the other bit of Dan Lepard's book and discovered the joys of biscuits, both savoury and sweet.  These things have a way of taking hold, as you can see from the picture above: ginger biscuits and macaroons for tea and elevenses, and savoury ones with blue cheese and oatmeal, or chilli flakes and almonds, for that glass of wine in the evening.  Although there are only two of us in the house, when you take visitors and our dogs into account as additional consumers we seem to get through a fair quantity each week!

What I'm a little anxious about is that I've only begun to deal with the contents of this book, by tackling the "Bread" and "Biscuits and cookies" sections.  However, there are six other sections, ranging from cakes (don't even go there) through "sugar sugar", covering sweets and fudges (go there even less) to pies and tarts for supper (mm, may be better).  Now I just have to hope that the Chinese doctor doesn't extend the restrictions...

Antony Mair

Café society

Our new "coffee house" in George Street (with Paul and the dogs)

When we had our estate agency in Ribérac, prospective buyers from the UK would speak wistfully of "café society".  I know what they had in mind: those expanses of tables and chairs on the broad pavements of Paris streets, where you can people-watch for hours.  I think they also had some idea of Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Gréco on the Boulevard Saint Germain: people dressed in bohemian black, discussing the meaning of life.  The concept was a sort of mish-mash of Sartre and Maurice Chevalier. 

Ribérac's cafés didn't really meet this sort of expectation.  I realised after a while that the people who frequented them most had the time to spare because they didn't spend it on DIY in their houses and gardens.  But they weren't exactly high-grade intellectuals either: they'd have appeared as out of place in les Deux Magots as a ploughman at Versailles.

What's curious, though, is that the English, who started the coffee house idea in London in the eighteenth century, seem to have given it up subsequently.  Starbucks and Costa may be reviled, but they at least reintroduced quality coffee to the UK after the filthy instant brew the English had lived on in previous decades.  I'm not sure that our new Hanushka Coffee House is going to be the haunt for Hastings' answers to Addison and Dryden, let alone Simone de Beauvoir, but for the moment it's a nice place to sit in the morning and watch people strolling through the Old Town.  And, this being a small place, you inevitably see a familiar face and someone to chat with.  Which is, I suppose, what society is all about anyway.

Antony Mair

   

How much do we need to be protected from quacks?

I recently saw this sign over a small shop in a mews behind Hastings' main shopping centre.  Among other establishments, the mews contains a dog-groomer, a reptile shop, a place to have your computer repaired, and a couple of alternative health establishments, of which Andrey Shipilov is one.

For me, the sign highlighted the difference in approach between the English and the French in matters relating to complementary medicine.  Basically, the French are suspicious of anything outside the mainstream.  When I told my French dentist that I was going to an osteopath she gave me a lecture about quacks and how I needed to be sure that I went to someone properly trained in France.  In the event I found myself in the hands of an excellent English osteopath who had been trained in the UK and been the first person to have her foreign qualification recognised in Aquitaine. 

The basic principle in French legislation is that the public needs to be protected from charlatans.  But I'm not convinced that the public is so dumb as the French legislators think.  Certainly Andrey Shipilov, who proclaims himself as a Russian doctor, appears to be under few constraints in his mews in Hastings.  I'm a fan of acupuncture and massage, having greatly benefited from both, but I'd not heard of Akabane testing.  When I saw the sign I immediately thought it was some additional quackery.  However, on Googling it, I came across a blog entry by Nora Franglen, founder of the School of Five Element Acupuncture in London.  This told me that Akabane testing was a way of testing an imbalance of energy between the two sides of the body, as a preliminary to treatment.

So the laugh is on me.  Yesterday I was laid low with a migraine, which usually involves a severe headache on my left temple and the left side of my forehead.  An excellent acupuncturist who has treated me in the past, explained to me several years ago that my migraines arise from an energy imbalance.  Foolishly, I had not located an acupuncturist here to continue the necessary maintenance treatment.  Paul has now rectified that, and I am due to see someone tomorrow.  I shall find out more about Akabane testing then. 

I may have reason yet to thank the Russian doctor for a tip.  Cupping, however, may be a step too far!

Antony Mair

Sunday lunch at Winchelsea Beach

Giant thistles at The Ship

Sunday lunch and Christmas are arguably the two occasions that have best survived the transition from a Christian to a secular society.  Churchgoing may be almost extinct, prayer transmuted into meditation and the Pope largely consigned to oblivion: but there's something about lunch that still belongs to Sunday.  If in France it remains an occasion for the gathering of the generations at a gastrobinge, in southern England there is a profusion of signs outside pubs advertising that most depressing of phenomena - the Carvery.  A nation that now feeds itself on readymade meals out of Marks & Spencers takes itself off to a pub in order to sample the memory of the roast meat mother used to make.

But you don't have to go that route.  Neighbours of ours kindly invited us to lunch at The Ship, in nearby Winchelsea Beach.  Formerly a slightly drab hostelry near a caravan site, it was taken over by a group of locals, including the flamboyant Tom Watkins.  The clapboard exterior was painted a New England shade of grey, and the main bar transformed into a US diner lookalike.  For me, though, the triumph is the garden behind.  Instead of the usual dreary grass/privet/wooden benches and tables the renovators landscaped it into a beachside Eden dominated by the architectural forms of phormium, yukka and verbena bonariensis, with ornamental grasses bedded in gravel.  Tables are set at discreet intervals, linked by a winding path of wooden planks. 

Yes, on a Sunday you can have meat carved from a spit-roasted animal - but there's a postmodern menu of other options, and desserts that can happily tip you over the edge into that other Sunday feature - the siesta.  And for those who need to shop in order to justify an excursion, there's a butcher and delicatessen full of irresistible goodies.  Perfick.

Antony Mair

POSTSCRIPT

Paul in his new motor - the pocket rocket

Reviving the spirits

   Chris Elam, yoga teacher and Ayurvedic masseur, outside the garden house he has built for yoga, massage and personalised retreats.

I discovered yoga in London almost ten years ago, and used to go along to a windowless studio in Shepherds Bush Shopping Centre with a crowd of young mothers.  I became a convert.  When we lived in France I attended less demanding sessions run by an only slightly eccentric Dutch woman in the attic of her home.  Outside, the rolling hills of the Verteillacois were an inspiration in themselves.  My fellow-participants were older than in London, but the sessions were still like a mini-holiday.

A search on the Net for yoga teachers in Hastings brought up Chris Elam, who runs classes about ten minutes' walk away from our house.  His website revealed that he also did Ayurvedic massage.  Paul had gone off to London to see an old friend, and the weather was depressing.  I was feeling a bit wan, and picked up the phone.

What I love about this town is its unpredictability.  Chris gives massage sessions in one of the bedrooms on the first floor of his 1930s house just outside the centre of town.  "The room's quite warm," he said on the way up.  This was an understatement: it was like a Turkish bath.  "I try to recreate the feeling of southern India," he said.

Had someone told me ten years ago that the day would come when a perfect stranger in Hastings would massage my back with his foot, I might well have expressed a degree of scepticism.  But that's the richness of life: you never know where you'll be next.  With enough warm oil on me for a skidpan, the sensation of the back being foot-massaged was on the pleasure side of pain although we got perilously close at times.  "Have you changed foot?" I asked when he switched from one side of the back to the other.  He had.  The replacement was colder, but soon warmed up.

I returned home with muscles relaxed and skin glowing.  Paul had got back from London.  "You smell like somewhere in India," he said.  I'm not sure where he had in mind.  All I know is that energy flows were restored by the following day.  Now I just have to get to the yoga class...

Antony Mair

Rediscovering Radio 4

                                                 The Shoebox pretends to be a big house!

During our seven years in France I rarely listened to BBC Radio.  If I listened to the radio at all it was to France Inter or France Musique.  I sometimes ventured onto France Culture, but they tended to have two-hour programmes on obscure items like Bolivian folkdancing or cavepaintings in Mali, which I found a bit self-indulgent.  France Inter had its oddities as well - in the midst of an interesting discussion about the French economy there would suddenly be a break with a song from one of the iconic French chansonniers before a return to the topic in hand. 

I'd always mocked French television as being stuck in a groove - with programme times unchanged in at least forty years, variety shows with people speaking into outsize microphones (had they not heard of overhead mikes?) and the same tired old American soaps dubbed into French.  So it came as a bit of a surprise to return to the UK and find that Radio 4 was even more stuck in a groove.  In fact it's like being in a timewarp.  John Humphreys continues on the Today Show, Women's Hour still parades its selfconscious concern about women's issues,  Any Questions is still touring scout-huts round the provinces, followed by the same dogmatic rightwingers calling in to Any Answers.   Nothing now gives me more pleasure than switching John Humphreys off when he is being self-righteous in the morning.  Unfortunately the contentious smugness seems to have spread to others on the news team, and I find myself switching off the lunchtime news as well.  The Moral Maze doesn't even get a look-in.

Recent articles in the newspapers have raised the question of Radio 4 being overly middle-class.  The role of the English middle classes is another topic on which I can fulminate at will.  But the prospect of change is like reforming the House of Lords - the people concerned are unlikely to proceed happily to the guillotine.  Meanwhile I have discovered that, through my computer, I can access dear old France Inter and find out what's happening across the Channel instead of listening to the London chattering classes pontificating to likeminded souls in Tunbridge Wells.   Vive la différence!

Antony Mair

Old Town Week continues...

                    The Carnival Queens give a helping hand

Old Town week continues, with its curious blend of folklore and history.  Yesterday we had the Whelk Eating Competition and the Seaboot Race - the latter involving people running up and down Courthouse Street in a pair of seaboots.  Last night was the race for the Jimmy Read Memorial Trophy.

The road leading up to our house is called Crown Lane.  Once a year, in Old Town Week, there is a race the length of it, in memory of Jimmy Read.  Jimmy, we are told, died 25 years ago, but was known throughout the Old Town because he delivered meat on his bicycle - no mean feat with the land rising steeply on both sides of the Bourne.  It is said that one day someone suggested to Jimmy that a moped would be easier - but the idea was rejected, since he believed it would always be quicker on his bike.

Jimmy's bicycle has been preserved or replicated, and is used each year for the race.  Riders are on-the-spot volunteers, who pay their pound to the starting official at the bottom of the lane, by the Crown Inn.  The rules are simple.  An old ten shilling note is placed beneath the rider's backside, and has to remain there for the full distance.  The bike has no gears and is heavy, so getting it up the hill is no mean feat.  At the top of the hill an official with a stopwatch records the time as the rider crosses a chalk line.

Simple, really.  But that's the charm of it.  From shortly after five in the afternoon until darkness fell at nine a substantial crowd lined both sides of the lane, cheering on the competitors.  Drinks supplied by the Crown Inn no doubt helped people to volunteer.  The riders came in all shapes and sizes, and moved at varying speeds - the fainthearted were sometimes given a push, which disqualified them, but nobody seemd to worry.  A good time was had by all.  I'm afraid that we retired indoors before the final prize was awarded, but doubtless there was a drink or two to celebrate!

Antony Mair

PS More snaps of the event if you click here - click on "Diaporama" for a slide show.