Eighteen With A Custard Cream

It was my daughter Lucy’s eighteenth birthday this week.  I’m sure this will seem familiar to many mums, but when the dickens did little Lucy get to be 18?  I’m sure she wasn’t anything like that age last time I looked.  However, there it was.  And Lucy (with some justification) thought that steps should be taken to celebrate.  The trouble was that two of her friends were also 18 last week and the prime time slot of Saturday night had been taken, as was Friday, so that pushed us back to Thursday.

It went like a dream.  There’s something to be said for being the first in the line of the party-givers, because everyone is fresh and ready for it, whereas come Saturday night, a certain amount of party-droop has set in.

There’s more to giving a party than meets the eye.  You have to hire a room, hire a DJ and – of course – decorate the place.  We covered the tables with blue paper with gold stars, which looked nice, had blue and gold helium balloons and lots of decorations saying 18!!!  That, plus the disco lights, made it look great.  And, of course, there was the cake.  For as long as anyone can remember, Lucy’s favourite biscuit has been custard creams.  She can consume vast amounts of them (without putting on any extra pounds as far as I can make out) so, when it came to a theme for her cake, there was only one real candidate.

Enter the Custard Cream…



It was about two feet by eighteen (how appropriate!) inches and was a real hit.  It’s not really a big biscuit.  All the decoration was laboriously shaped out of icing and put on by yours truly.  It took hours. Was it worth it?  Of course it was.

And then there were the pizzas.  It’s a waste of time doing a “proper” buffet for a teenagers’ party.  Everyone’s dancing and far too busy to eat, but pizzas sounded like a good idea. So I ordered pizzas from the local take-away.  Now let me see… About 60 teenagers equals about 30 pizzas plus 20 pizza-sized garlic breads.  That’s about right, isn’t it?  Er, no.  Have you any idea how much room 50 pizza boxes takes up? As yet more pizza boxes arrived, I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia doing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  You know, when he casts the spell and all the brushes and buckets come to life and he can’t turn it off.  Pizzas! shouted everyone enthusiastically and proceeded to ignore them in order to get on with dancing.  At the end of the evening, I stood by the door, giving them out like party bags.  Apparently there were a lot of teenagers eating pizza next day in college.  One of these days they’ll work out how to eat at the party but that’s when sober middle age strikes.  Hopefully that’s a long way off.  I’m still getting over the fact she’s eighteen.

Seeing the Pope

Jenny and Lucy went to see the Pope, which isn’t something you do every week.  I had to get them to the school gates for two in the morning (again, not something that I do often) for them to get down to Twickenham on the coach in time for the Big Assembly, as the mass-meeting with school-children and various educators was called.  It all went tickety-boo, apparently, and they’ve got various bags and books and little flags as mementoes.

We’ve all seen the Pope before, in what you might call his natural habitat of St Peter’s Square.  It was Easter Sunday morning, a couple of years ago and we’d gone on a coach trip to Italy.  (Leger Coaches; highly recommended.)  Spring in Italy! I said, selling the idea like mad to my nearest and dearest.  Goodness knows what I thought it’d be like – sort of springlike, I suppose – and waxed as lyrical as a tourist brochure.  Manchester to Rome? queried the partner of my joys and sorrows.  Isn’t that a bit of a long journey?  We’ll love it, I assured him.  Won’t it be interesting to actually drive through Europe.

Well, we were both right.  Blimey, Rome’s so far away, I don’t know how the Ancient Romans, who seem to pop up everywhere, every made it, let alone stroll round Britain as if they owned the place.  And they didn’t have coaches. Mind you, the weather in Ancient Mamucium must have made them feel at home.  I’ve never encountered so much rain in all my born days as we did in Italy in the spring.  It was like being underwater.  Molto agitato said the weatherman on the Italian TV.  (We nicknamed him Colonel Weather because, oddly to our eyes, he was dressed up in full air force uniform with a moustache Hercule Poirot would have a hissy fit over.)  Anyway, it molto agitatioed and then some.

Now, the thing about coach trips is that you chum up with the other passengers and one girl, Charlotte, we got on with like a house on fire.  Charlotte was Jewish and quickly cottoned on to the fact we were Catholics.  At this point, the fairly glamorous thirty-year old Charlotte turned into my mother.   “You must,” she said, organizing the Gordon-Smiths, “see the pope. You can’t come to Rome and not see the Pope.  You must,” she said firmly, “be longing to see the Pope.”  Well, I wasn’t conscious of longing exactly, but there we were on Easter Sunday morning in the huge crowds outside St Peter’s Square and there, in the very far distance, was the Pope.

Charlotte was thrilled.  As the rain beat down, all the Gordon-Smiths got wetter and wetter and our thoughts turned fondly in the direction of a café.  Coffee. Tea. Food.  Not raining.  So, much to Charlotte’s horror, we upped sticks and beetled off.  She scurried after us, a drenched but determined Jewish mentor, reminding us of our religious duties.  “At the very least,” she said, sounding more like my mother than ever,“you must go to Mass.”  So, we Charlotte behind, encouraging us on, she ushered us into a church and, duty done, we found a café. There, on a television screen, was coverage of the ceremony still proceeding a few hundred yards away, under a haze of water, with depressed blokes in wet hats with wet feathers in them were gathered round a wet Pope.  “I told you,” said Charlotte, pointing to the TV screen in triumph, “that you had to see the Pope.”  Cup of delicious Italian coffee in hand, I thought it was a pretty good compromise.

Home-made Chutney

Autumn, I’m afraid, is a coming in, as a medieval poet might say.  Or, as Keats phrased it, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun.”  I admit you’d have to look pretty damn hard to see any sun in Manchester recently – the mist element has been stressed rather a lot, also the pelting rain – but it did dry up long enough last weekend to let me pick the apples.

We’ve got two smallish apple trees, a Worcester Pearmain and a Granny Smiths and both trees have produced a bumper crop.

So what on earth do you do with zillions of apples?  Eat them, yes, I’d got as far as that myself, but there’s a limit to how many apples even a family our size can munch through.  So I turned to chutney.

Wow.  It’s gorgeous.  There’s something about home-made chutney that knocks any other sort of pickle into a cocked hat.  What you should do, according to the recipe, is leave the chutney in a cool dark cupboard for two to three months (and if that’s not handy for Christmas, I don’t know what is.)  The trouble is, it tastes so fantastic, we’ve been through two jars already, and, as it’s just crying out for a knock-your-socks-off cheddar to go with it, it’s not doing my diet any good.

Here’s the recipe if you want to give it a go.

1 pound of onions

4 pounds of apples

8 ounces of dried fruit

1 ounce of ginger

1 ounce of paprika

1 ounce of mixed spice

1 ounce of salt

1 and a half pounds of granulated sugar

A pint and a half of malt vinegar

Chop up the apples and the onions and put them into a big pan. The great thing about using up the apples in this way, is that you can use all the very tiny ones that will never be much good for eating.  I put them into the vinegar right away, and then they don’t start going brown and sad looking.  Add everything else, bring it to the boil and then let it simmer for three hours or so.  Give it a stir every so often.  You can tell it’s ready when it goes fairly thick and, if you draw a wooden spoon across the mixture, it leaves a channel that doesn’t immediately fill with liquid.

In the meantime, sterilize your jam-jars.  The easiest way of doing this is to put a titchy bit of cold water in the bottom and give each jar a minute in the microwave.  You’ll have to sterilize the  lids too, and the easiest way to do that is by boiling them in water for a while.  (Five minutes or so should do it.)  Then – carefully because they’re hot (der!) – put the jars in a warm oven to dry out.

Then put the chutney into the warm jars with a little greaseproof or waxed paper insert on top of the chutney.  That stops the metal in the lid reacting with the vinegar in the chutney.  Then wait two to three months… if you can!

The Importance of Being Bone Idle

Assiduous readers might have noticed (!) that I’ve recently published a book on Amazon’s Kindle.  Now, one of the ways that a basically idle writer can escape work (ie, the hard stuff where you sit down and actually make the stuff up) is by dickering about on a computer.  You know the sort of thing:  read the emails, reply to the emails, read all the emails on any lists you subscribe to (Crime Through Time and DorothyL in my case) reply to same, check the lyrics on Google of that song that you can’t place, and – and this is a real trap – check your ratings on Amazon.  Geesh, that takes time!  I can’t tell you how long you can nosy round Amazon, gently reassuring yourself it’s sort of work.  This is the sort of inner dialogue that goes on.

CONSCIENCE:         Well, here we are, bright and early, ready to start work, yes?

SELF:                          Let me just see what the rest of the world is up to, yes?

CONSCIENCE:         You could do some work first.

SELF:                          Whimper!  What if the editor’s emailed?  I can’t miss that, can I?

CONSCIENCE:            Okay, just check.  See?  There’s nothing there that can’t wait.

SELF:                          But… But… I need to see if anyone’s left a review on Amazon. (BRIGHTLY) I need to know about that, don’t I?

CONSCIENCE:            Do it later!

SELF:                          Now!  Want it now!  (IN DEFIANCE OF CONSCIENCE LOGS ONTO AMAZON)

CONSCIENCE:            (THWARTED, CONSCIENCE RETIRES INTO A CORNER AND SULKS.)

This is roughly the sort of thing that happens most mornings.  However, every so often, SELF scores the winning goal, so to speak.  You see, the thing about Amazon is that the ratings are updated every hour, and if some kindly-minded individual (or even small groups of same) has bought your book that’ll send your ratings soaring.  And if you don’t check your ratings NOW, as SELF would say, you’ll never know that for one brief shining moment, you’ve actually blipped on the Top Anything.  And yesterday morning, after CONSCIENCE and SELF had had their usual knock-down, drag-out fight, SELF proudly reported to CONSCIENCE that – wait for it – Frankie’s Letter was Number 76 in Kindle’s Action and Adventure category, Number 14 in Spy Stories and Tales of Intrigue (Incidentally, when was the last time you logged onto Amazon and thought, “D’you know what, I fancy a Tale of Intrigue” or, when the partner of your joys and sorrows says, “What are you reading?” reply “A Tale of Intrigue, darling.”? My other half would think I was bonkers) and Number 9 – Number 9! – in British Detectives.

SELF had a celebration.  CONSCIENCE has moodily admitted that SELF sometimes has a point.