Cheese puffs.

I have just made some cheese puffs. I have no idea why. I have never made a cheese puff in my life.

I am practising for my mother’s wake, which is on Saturday. I am in charge of the food. I am doing some old favourites which I can cook in my sleep, but I suddenly wanted something a bit different. So I got the puff pastry and played around with it and filled it with cheese and rolled it and rolled it and cut out little disks using an Edwardian sherry glass (exactly the right size for the puff, it turns out) and presto! – a cheese puff.

I have no concept of why I suddenly decided these would be the very thing for my mother. She never made them when we were little. They were not a tea-time favourite or a Saturday treat. We did not sit around in a pleading chorus, our eyes as yearning as those of Dickensian orphans, shouting: please, please, THE CHEESE PUFFS. I don’t think I’ve ever knowing eaten a cheese puff. I’m not sure I could have told you what they looked like. But that is what we are having.

I find the whole thing most surprising.

Riding and cooking, I think; those are the places where I am all right. In the field and in the kitchen. Do some people get very stout when they lose their mothers? Cooking, cooking, cooking, like a demented Italian mamma (do Italian mothers still think that food is the cure for all ills?), making soup and taking it round in pots so that the dear stepfather can keep up his strength, making something, some good offering.

He said this morning: ‘I still have my appetite. Is that wrong?’

I said: ‘It’s marvellous. You must eat, because it’s so bloody tiring. If we did not eat we would fall over.’

My step-aunt, whom I adore, has arrived, and we all have breakfast together, and it’s all hysterically British. We make little stabs at irony and talk about the news and generally carry on. The said is all in the unsaid. Occasionally, our eyes slide towards each other, acknowledging all the things that are tacit. (These are: it’s bloody awful; the house is so empty without her; everywhere you look there are heart-breaking little reminders.)

Then I stomp off to the field and there are my dear mares, as still and centred and peaceful as two little Zen mistresses, and I mix up their feed and give them their hay and do a little work with them and feel the heavy ache lift. They are both very affectionate by nature. Not all horses are. Some are like cats, and don’t care much for human stroking. These ladies are also getting into their furry stage for winter, despite their aristocratic bloodlines, so they are like two beloved teddy bears. I hug them and rub them and talk to them and they blink their liquid eyes at me and whicker down their velvety noses.

I suddenly thought this morning: this is like being in a foreign country. It’s as if I’ve gone abroad, to somewhere not very nice, where I can’t quite remember the idioms and am not certain of the food and can’t read the road signs. I have been to this doleful country before, but the memory is not sharp. So I drove along the river to anchor myself in my own country and look at my favourite hill and watch the water go by.

And then I went and did some more cooking.

 

Today’s pictures:

The river:

The teddy bear:

Of work and time and great, great mares.

As I go up to HorseBack to do my morning stint, I get put up on a horse. If someone says to me ‘Would you want to ride?’ the only answer is yes. The horses need a last go over the obstacle course in the arena before the first participants arrive next week, and it also means that the HorseBack team who are studying for their UK Coaching Certificate can put in some teaching practice. I get to have fun and feel useful and learn more about the Western riding, which is starting to feel less strange to me now.

As I leave, I get a lovely invitation to lunch. Feeling like an idiot, I have to say no, because I am running back to my desk. The three current projects I am juggling must be juggled, and my time management has not yet caught up, even though I swear I am going to improve it every day. Lunch just now is a thing of moments; fuel from the fridge to get through the rest of the day. This is quite odd, for a greedy person like me, but a great relief for Red the Mare since it means I shall make a nice light weight on her back.

I was reading yesterday about someone going on the notorious 5-2 diet. I thought: I have a diet. It’s the No Diet Diet, which is good for me since I refuse to go on any weight-loss regime for political reasons. I think it would make the Pankhursts sad. The suffragettes did not chain themselves to railings so that I could hate my body. On the other hand, if you are riding a kind thoroughbred mare, it’s only polite not to be too heavy on her.

The No-Diet Diet consists of: taking on absurd amounts of work and being useless at managing your time, which means that you have no space to cook great lunches loaded with olive oil as was my old tradition. Now it’s a ham sandwich and a cup of green soup, which makes the banting effortless. I’m far too busy even to notice I am eating less than usual.

I would like though, when kind people say come and have lunch, to be able to smile and say yes, instead of shaking my head with a wild look of panic in my eyes. I am going to work on order and lists. I am going to make timetables and stick to them. I’ll get there in the end.

All focus today is to finish work in time to settle down and watch the mighty Hurricane Fly in the 5.30 at Punchestown. Yesterday, the great mare Quevega made me cry actual tears of joy and admiration with her dancing brilliance. I hope today my lovely Fly will do the same.

A snatch of poetry suddenly comes into my head. It is from George Whyte Melville, a horseman to his boots, who fought with the Turkish cavalry in the Crimea.

‘I have lived my life -I am nearly done –
I have played the game all round;
But I freely admit that the best of my fun
I owe it to horse and hound.
With a hopeful heart and a conscience clear,
I can laugh in your face, Black Care;
Though you're hovering near, there's not room for you here,
On the back of my good grey mare.’

Ah, I think, a hardened old fellow brought almost to sentimentality by the very thought of his darling girl. Mares do that I think, whether you see them on the racecourse, or mooch with them in the field. At Punchestown, Quevega looked so tiny and plain compared to the great shining strapping geldings she was up against. She has no flashy looks; like the equally brave and brilliant Dawn Run, she is a most ordinary bay mare. Nothing to look at, said the commentators. I don’t mean to be rude, one of them added. Yet it is true; she would never catch the eye in the paddock.

But oh, when she was let loose by Ruby Walsh in the glimmering Irish sun, she was a thing of singing beauty. Poetry in motion is a platitude now, rubbed thin with use, but it could have been minted for her.

As I stood with Red later, in the evening light, feeling her dear head resting on my shoulder, scratching her cheek and telling her the story of the race, I thought: there really is something about the ladies. The mares stop my heart like nothing else.

 

Today’s pictures:

Talking of ladies, here are some splendid ones. The sheep and lambs have come for their annual visit to the south meadow. It is a real sign of spring and makes me smile every time I see them:

Daffs:

Winnie, one of my favourite HorseBack UK mares, who is doing good work this week:

Grinning madly, getting better at the Western, on the supremely relaxed Apollo:

Mr Stanley, with a look which says: don’t mention squirrels unless you really mean it:

My lovely girl:

The hill:

In which I contemplate the nature of time

It’s amazingly easy to lose two days. It’s as if they simply fell down the back of the sofa. I know there is the thing of the brain processing time differently as you get older, but even so. Simple neurobiological explanations seem too pat.

Actually, the first one was just life, which sometimes comes and usurps the virtual world. Very old friends were up from the south, and came to lunch. The group included two of my favourite children of all time, who did special dancing for me, admired the horse, shrieked with laughter at the pony, paid adoring homage to the Pigeon, and made a small house in the garden out of old wall stones, moss and pine branches.

‘When we come back next time,’ said the small girl, ‘we can see if fairies have come to live there.’

I love that children say these things with earnest, straight faces. I like it that even in the rushing technological world, small girls still believe in fairies.

The small boy was exercised about the closing ceremony of the Olympics. He had not thought it terribly good. ‘If I were in charge,’ he said, ‘I would have had people singing songs about lakes.’

He is seven years old. I looked at him very seriously. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘on a sort of Wordsworthian theme.’

He nodded gravely. ‘And a song about the River Thames,’ he said.

‘Absolutely bloody brilliant idea,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry, I did a swear.’

Quite frankly, that child is so remarkable that he does make me do a swear. I’m not sure I know anyone else of that age who would dream of songs of lakes.

My Italian mamma had kicked in, so of course there could not just be any old lunch, but there must be a feast. Two chickens were sacrificed, with marjoram from the garden, and bunches of sage stuffed in the cavity. There was a tomato salad with chives, and a beetroot salad with real actual beetroot I boiled myself, instead of the vacuum-packed stuff, and broad beans and feta and mint. There were tiny waxy potatoes and roasted peppers and aubergines and a plain green salad for a bit of continental chic. There was not enough room on the table for all the absurd platters of food. I’m still finishing it all up. (Very good stock on the stove even as I write.)

Yesterday, there were no visitors or cooking, just the low sound of time whooshing past, and me turning my head to see where it had gone.

Today, I am still catching up. I keep looking at my watch in amazement and alarm. How can it be lunchtime?

The ponies, as usual, gave me calm and succour. Up in that field there is a sense that I can recapture time. It’s the one place where everything slows down, and instead of the wild sense of mortality screaming past, I get a moment of anchor, as if I am attached to the land, as if I can feel the very earth turning gently on its axis.

There is something timeless about looking out over that blue hill, and watching the cattle graze there, as they have probably grazed for hundreds of years. The horses themselves cannot do anything in a hurry. They do not understand the concept of rush. I am impelled to take a deep breath and let my shoulders come down and concentrate on each moment as it presents itself.

I had to get strict with the small pony today. There’s always a fine line you tread with horses. They need you to be firm and determined; if you get too soppy and soft it is no good to man nor beast. On the other hand, you must not be cross or mean. The firmness, I discover, should take the form of not giving in. There is no call for raised voices or any form of punishment, there is just serious persistence. Myfanwy did not want to do something; I wanted her to do it. We had a small battle. Eventually, I prevailed.

I had been stern; I wondered if she would hold it against me. In fact, she seemed relieved. She dropped her head and chewed with her little mouth and relaxed her body. That’s what I wanted, she seemed to be saying; someone who would damn well come along and take charge.

Red the Mare, by contrast, was doing her thing which she sometimes does, which is elevating sweetness and goodness to Olympian levels, as if the Adorable Elves had been up in the night, teaching her to make my heart burst in my chest. Ha ha ha, she seemed to be saying, I shall do this for you, and this and that, and a bit of the other, just for fun, just to demonstrate how absolutely immaculate I am. She was doing things before I even asked her, as if reading my thoughts; matching each delicate step to mine; taking harmony to a whole new level.

I was so overcome by her cleverness that I practically exploded with delight and joy, and she ducked her head as if to say, aw, shucks, it was nothing, knowing all the time it was everything.

And that was when time stopped completely. We finished, and I gave the top of her neck a long, congratulatory rub, and she bent her head into the crook of my arm, and then leant it on my chest, and went to sleep. I felt the wobble in her lower lip, and saw the flutter of her eyelashes, and sensed the stillness in every atom of her body.

That is when you can stop all the clocks. I’ve written of this before, and each time, words come up short. Thoroughbreds have been domesticated for a long time, but they still carry the wild in them. When Red is hearing her ancestral voices, and galloping about the field, squealing and kicking and pawing at vacancy, with her tail up like a banner and her head high, there is nothing domestic in her at all. She is right back to the Arabian sands of her Darley ancestor. So, when she gives herself to me absolutely, in stillness and trust, and what a human might call love, as she did this morning, it feels like something so vast and elemental that I cannot find the English for it.

Everything stops: time, fret, plans, errands to run, letters to write, books to finish, agents to speak to. The news stops and the global economy and the very world itself.

It’s just two sentient creatures in a field.

 

Pictures:

House, from Monday, ready for guests:

I always feel a bit of a eejit when I put up pictures like this. I think it is because normally everything is a bit scruffy; mud from my boots, piles of papers, tottering towers of old political periodicals. It’s as if I wish to prove to the Dear Readers that, on high days and holidays, I can take the straw out of my hair.

The Pidge, very excited about the imminent arrivals:

Myfanwy the Pony:

Red the Mare:

Red’s View:

The hill, from a slightly different angle than usual:

I haven’t done a recipe for ages, and one of the Dear Readers said the other day that he still makes one of my soups, from months ago, so I am inspired to return to food. No time now, but tomorrow, I think I shall give you the beetroot salad, partly because I am very proud of it, and partly because I love the idea of making what is often thought as a rather horrid vegetable, filled with haunting childhood memories (that ghastly beetroot drowned in vinegar from school) absolutely delicious.

A good man

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

On this day, one year ago, my funny, clever, tall, handsome, kind cousin died at the stupid age of 57.

He did lots of interesting and rather impressive things in his life: he made olive oil, he designed gardens, he spoke perfect Italian. But what I really remember him for was his ability to make your heart lift, when you walked into a room and saw him standing there.

He had that kind of easy charm that is so bone-deep that it’s not like charm at all. It’s a lovely human facility to make other humans feel comfortable and happy and as if they are suddenly a little bit more brilliant and amusing than they thought themselves five minutes before.

One of my other relations says that you can divide people into drainers and radiators. There are those ones that suck the very will to live out of you, with their insistence on looking on the bleak side, or their dedicated neediness, or their dramatic sense of self, which means that every single thing that ever happens is all about them. Then there are the radiators, who radiate laughter and good times and general approval and a clever sense of their own essential absurdity, which allows you to be absurd too, and not to worry about it.

Well, the cousin was a radiator. I remember him always laughing. I remember him wry and teasing and dry as a bone. It’s idiotic that he is not here. He is the one I am thinking of today, and those who loved him, and whom he loved right back.

 

For some reason, in a kind of living well, seize the day kind of manner, I decided to make a really proper dinner. Delightful baked Portobello mushrooms, which I put in dish, scattered with marjoram from the garden, crushed garlic, lots of Maldon salt and black pepper and a huge knob of butter, and am now cooking for about twenty minutes. I'm going to eat them with a very bloody sirloin steak, and that is that:

Outside, the garden was blooming in the gloaming:

The Pigeon, blue in the light, had found a most excellent stick:

Up in her field, Red the Mare would be gazing out to the west, which is what she has been doing most of the day, as if there is something there of infinite fascination:

And the hill is its majestic, hilly self, unmoved by small human regrets:

A quick day

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I have now written today’s blog in my head about eight times. I cannot tell you how many philosophical, political and domestic matters I have covered. Unfortunately, events have conspired to keep me from the computer, so that now I sit down at five-thirty, and it’s pitch dark outside, and I am too tired for a long, involved blog. I know you shall be beating your fists on the table with disappointment.

Instead, here is a little digest of my Saturday:

I looked with pleasure at the elegant winter sun.

I ran errands in the village. Everyone was smiling. They said: ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’

I had a disastrous afternoon’s betting, which cut me down to size. But the racing was fascinating. I kept ringing up my mother and saying: ‘That’s one to follow.’ I always do this. Then I quite forget the One to Follow’s name, and it’s back to square one.

I got cross because a rather sneering journalist, of whom I had never heard, derided Britishness on Any Questions. Scottishness, apparently, is the one true thing. Britishness is just a pathetic nothing. I may come back to this subject. I thought she was wrong, but worse, she was very ill-mannered about it. There’s no call for that on the BBC.

I missed my dad. Time does not gentle the missing; if anything, it is keener and sharper now. But the recovery time is quicker; the gaps in between are more solid, and more real.

I laughed at the clichéd middle-classness of my food shopping. In my basket were: duck’s legs, puy lentils, Taleggio, rocket, dried mushrooms, and some yellow split peas. I am a parody of myself. At least I am not quite as bad as the very superior lady I saw in the Co-op last week, who roared at her husband: ‘Go and find the chorizo’. Chorizo in the Co-op? Good luck with that.

I awarded The Pigeon the Little Nell award for pathos. When I examined her sore foot she made little mewing noises, trembled, and gazed at me with ineffable reproach, like an orphan in the snow. The minute we went out into the sun, she got the scent of moles and voles in her nostrils, and galloped off like a two-year-old, with not a trace of lameness.

I listened to an endless debate about the direness of Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party. I can’t quite work out if it is real, or whether it is just a herd meme. It’s a much more interesting story, after all, than Mili Minor does Quite Well. I must say, he does not fill one with confidence and conviction.

I made some minestrone. I am in a serious soup stage, just at the moment.

That was about it.

 

Here are some pictures for you:

I hope you are having a lovely weekend.

Tuesday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Or, in which my brain goes phhhttt. This may be a continuing theme for the next few weeks, as deadline time is approaching and I am in a constant state of nervous exhaustion. This is a Good Thing, because it means I have done something each day. It is good productive nerves rather than bad unproductive ones. But still, it leaves me incapable of speech or thought by this time of day.

I did 1051 words today, which was slightly unexpected. I had slept badly for the last two nights and feared it might be one of those days when I must do a great deal of research. Even though this is work, it does not feel like work because there is no word count by the end of it. At this stage, obsessive counting of words goes with the territory.

I did do one miraculous thing. I finally worked out a way to get salt and pepper squid to be really crispy, something which has eluded me until now. I have managed to get suspicion of crisp, but not the full crunch. (How like a horrid advert that sounds.) The secret is: cornflour, and really, really hot oil, hotter than you think, so hot it is about to burn. It was nearly as good as E&O, with the added advantage that I did not have to look at very, very thin ladies who never eat carbs while I ate it. (For those of you not familiar with West London: E&O is that maddening kind of restaurant where the food is remarkably good, but the clientele is quite annoying, and the staff is a little too conscious that they work in a place considered trendy. It's the kind of joint I long to march into in my gumboots, with actual straw in my hair.)

It was another low, still day, the kind of weather which is neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. It was the kind of day when you have to look quite hard for the beauty, as everything seems a little drab and flat. But of course once one focuses in the eyes, there it all is.

The growing things in the garden:

The wider view:

I went down to see if the daffodils on the avenue were showing any signs of life. Not much, yet:

The Pigeon came faithfully with:

The Duchess did not join us for the daffodil hunt, because she was off sniffing for moles. I regard this as a VERY good sign:

This next one may be what the internets call Cute Overload. I call it too much beauty:

See how the Duchess looks so much brighter? I am starting to think the whole vet visit freaked her out a bit, and obviously any stress is not good for someone with a heart condition. She has had a lot of extra care and attention since then, and the love of half the blogosphere from the dear readers, and she seems much happier today. I keep my fingers cautiously crossed.

Coming back to the house, I wondered about the daffodils. I had seen one in flower on Saturday and was frantically excited. It is not so much that I love daffodils; I am not mad for yellow flowers. It is that, along with the oystercatchers, who are careening about over the south meadow, singing as they go, they are the real harbingers of spring. So I was rather disappointed to find that my one daff was clearly an outlier. And then, then, I saw these:

Definitely, definitely spring. Although, having said that, we shall now be snowed in for a week.

Today's hill:

Thank you again for your extraordinary response to Sunday's post. I always worry when I talk about the dogs, thinking it will put people off, especially if they are cat people, but the dogs posts are always the ones that get the biggest postbag. Of course I think the Pigeon and the Duchess are the two most delightful, fascinating creatures known to woman, but I would not necessarily expect anyone else to agree. I can't tell you how much it warms every last cockle of my heart to find how you dear readers respond to them. Although you should not encourage me too much, or it will be all canines, all the time, and you'll never get a good meaty political post ever again. And I know you would consider that a terrible shame.