Easter Sunday dinner was always a large free range turkey as there was a poultry farm in the next village. The vegetables came from the garden and to finish after the local cheeses was always a famous raspberry trifle. The recipe for this delicious concoction consisting of layers of fruit, jelly, custard and fresh cream sprinkled with flaked almonds had been passed down through the family from Great |Grandmother Hannah.
I had always grown my own vegetables and I always froze the produce we did not eat at once. By this time of year I had to go searching with a torch and the step ladder to find the elusive last green striped bag of plump raspberries hidden under a box of string beans.
I was really grateful to my parents for whatever the teenage equivalent of babysitting was called and felt so sad when my parents set off on the long journey home to the Lakes.
My heart actually ached as their drove out along the drive and away into the countryside…..
Happy Easter
Hot cross buns and parrot tulips from The Boomer Generation
My parents stayed with us for Easter. I loved the Easter holidays and put as much effort into making them special as I did Christmas.
To decorate the house with fresh greenery and spring flowers was such fun. Parrot Tulips, Hyacinths and Lily of the Valley poured their exquisite scent all over the house. I spent a lovely hour in the kitchen making coloured eggs by boiling them in onion skins whilst I listened to the radio. I looked out of my kitchen window to see all the family sitting under the wisteria covered arbour in the spring sunshine. It felt wonderful to have my parents there with my children.
I spent a day baking and made a traditional Simnel cake with almond paste and then crafted handmade Easter Eggs which were a little wonky but all the better for it.
. In the years when the children were small we usually had a brisk walk round Tarn Hows near Coniston on Good Friday and always took a flask of hot chocolate and homemade hot cross buns with us for sustenance. We alternated between drawing a cross with a butter knife or rolling out pastry for the top.
I discovered early on that small children like to roll out pastry, bigger ones like economy of effort.
Hot cross buns and parrot tulips from The Boomer Generation by Carole McCall
The Taste of White Asparagus. extract taken from The Boomer Generation by Carole Mccall dueout in May
The restaurant was spacious and elegant and as I first made small talk first to my left and then to my right .I really hoped the main course was going to be delicious. I had been to so many occasions where men in tuxedos and women in splendid evening dresses were offered the kind of food that should only be eaten behind closed doors.
The creamy vegetable soup arrived with a puff pastry lid and as diners tenuously lifted it to expose the liquid contents those with glasses looked like Mr Magoo and those without glasses just got very smarty eyes. Any woman daring to rub her eyes was giving a good approximation of a panda with smudged mascara, as waterproof had not been invented by then.
Finally the star of the show arrived with all the pomp and ceremony befitting its status in German society. When the waiters lifted the silver domes there sat huge plates of white asparagus dripping with creamy butter.
I looked round and you could see my fellow diner’s confusion as to how they were going to eat this. “Blow this, I do not care anymore” I thought as I decided to tuck in without a care for the consequences. Butter dripped down all our chins as we enjoyed the delicious fare and we laughed all the way back to the hotel.
From The Boomer Generation by Carole McCall
La Ruta del Cares – Spectacular Hiking in Spain
This gallery contains 7 photos.
Originally posted on Travel Tales of Life:
Spain’s La Ruta del Cares (The Cares Route) is reported to be one of the most spectacular hikes in all of Spain. The Cares gorge and the river it is named after, separate…
THE HOUR OF THE WOLF extract from The Boomer Generation out in May 2015
THE HOUR OF THE WOLF
The best cure for insomnia is lots of sleep. W.C. Fields
Insomnia was a boon when my children were small especially as my oldest son seemed to have inherited my “Shut your eyes at your peril” complex. He was still awake after midnight and up again before the dawn chorus asking complicated questions before he opened his eyes. In the days before Google that meant many trips to the library.
It was however, so lonely in the small hours of the night before the advent of night time radio and television. I was relaxed until two thirty am as that was yesterday and I was positive after four thirty am as that was tomorrow.
The two hours between two thirty five am and four thirty five am were my difficult hours when the weight of the world pressed on my chest. I did not realise that other people felt the same as me until just after my autumn wedding in 1968.
I hated scary films with a passion and somehow unintentionally read an advert for Ingmar Bergman’s surrealist The Hour of the Wolf in the Manchester Evening News.
It brought another troubled perspective to my thinking.
“The hour of the wolf is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful.”
“Bloody Hell” I thought “I am glad I did not know that when I was a child as it would have finished me off completely”
I used to iron in those sleep deprived hours and one night I stepped into the kitchen to get the little plastic jug that I used to put water in my steam iron.
I noticed the jug sitting there on the dresser already full of water and so I picked it up and lazily poured the liquid into the top of the iron.
My eyes were focused upon the vase of fat, yellow King Alfred daffodils that I had picked in the garden earlier in the day and the powerful scent suddenly assaulted my nose and I sneezed loudly, several times. The first lines of a long forgotten poem crossed my mind.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o e’r vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils”.
Two things crossed my mind at once, William Wordsworth and toffee. I knew what the Wordsworth connection was but I could not for the life of me understand the very strong smell of toffee in the room. I was beginning to think I was developing synaesthesia.
Of course this incident happened in the nineteen seventies when every modern home had a Soda Stream fizzy drink maker. Someone, who shall remain nameless, had left the remnants of the lemonade sugar syrup in my jug.
I had in turn had poured the colourless liquid in my new iron and because my head was in the clouds I had started to iron the collar of a brand new white linen shirt with molten toffee. My sleepless night cost me the price of a new iron an even more expensive shirt the next morning.
The Boomer Generation by Carole McCall
The Boomer Generation …out in May 2015
The Boomer Generation
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”
The Baby Boomer Generation had everything including freedom, music, power and enough excitement to power a fleet of rocket ships. Easy access to the professions, inexpensive housing and a voice to be heard all came with the territory.
That sense of eternal sunshine that made everything glow and gleam, seemed like an everlasting reality. We did not think twice as we chased the mirage of unattainable possibility.
There was a certain kind of post war woman that was raised in the suffocating fifties fairyland and in a society that told her there was absolutely only one man in the world for her. A handsome, reliable and responsible man was going to love her forever in a beautiful cottage with roses around the door.
This woman was a teenager in the sixties who could not believe her luck at being invited to this vibrant life party: where everybody danced in miniskirts all night long to the beat of music nobody had ever heard before.
She was a young mother in the seventies who lived the vegetable growing, bread making good life and then rushed back to work because she had read about feminism and that seductive philosophy had turned the dial on her fuzzy self-image and made it clear and sharp.
She was a loving but determined parent and conscientious employee in the eighties. She was an excellent hostess for her husband when he needed her and a part of every parent teacher association and school governing body that would have her.
Did I also mention that she was slender and glamorous with a beautiful garden and always wore perfume?
Her name was Gullible; her name was Me……
Go Down the Rabbit Hole: A Writer’s Manifesto
Food for thought..
1. You are the work. The work is you: both an articulation of the self and a possibility for self-reflection. Be honest in creation: allow yourself to bleed into the work, but also allow it to work on you. Your work can show you things: illuminate and clarify your own thoughts, motivations, actions. If you do it right, you will find the work changing you, too.
2. Thinking is process. Laying on the floor. Sitting on park benches. Getting lost on purpose. These are all working. Learn the difference between mindless distraction and mindful wandering.
3. Go down the rabbit hole. Sometimes the work isn’t about what you think it is. Allow yourself to get lost down alleyways, to follow a train of thought around a corner. Don’t feel you need to reign yourself in. Too much focus squeezes all the possibility for revelation out of the work.
4. Fear…
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Weekend Wanderings: More from Melbourne Zoo
This gallery contains 25 photos.
Carole McCall Author and Coach 