round up
good things come in threes
The elements of this photo – the bread, the damson jam and the butter, were all made by right here in the kitchen where I’m writing this. Imagine that!
I’ve made jam and bread for years but butter is a new one for me. This was my second attempt and I’m please with it. The style is French – I cultured the cream with some live yogurt overnight before churning – but also American in that there is a little salt in it. The churning was done with a food mixer and the only other equipment I bought was muslin to strain off the buttermilk.
The buttermilk quite quickly became blueberry muffins and the blueberry muffins quickly became crumbs.
I don’t have the temperament or the need to do this every day and I make no pretence to self-sufficiency. I have no desire to romanticise the drudgery of daily labour when, for the most part, I can go to a local shop and buy the same stuff. Nevertheless, I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. Also, I know exactly what is in all three products and, more to the point, what isn’t. The bread is made from 100% organic spelt flour and live yeast, the jam is fruit from my garden with sugar water and a little lemon juice and the butter is live yogurt, double cream and half a teaspoon of salt. There are no other additives, flavourings, or preservatives.
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Who do I think I am?
I’ve watched a reasonable amount of TV in the last week in the sense that I’ve binged on some series. One that has interested me particularly was on BBC – DNA Family Secrets. The programme is relatively formulaic and revolves around people who, for one reason or another, want to trace their family. Very often these are people who have been adopted or people with family mysteries to solve using DNA samples.
The thing that strikes me about almost all of the people who participate is that they are looking for some kind of anchor for their identity, for a broader sense of belonging in a more abstract sense than the family that brought them up. It’s something that I can empathise with, albeit that my knowledge of my social lineage is pretty secure, going back in several to the mid-eighteenth century.
Even so, I’d like to map what I know of my social background onto what appears to be my genetic background. This is probably a losing battle as the genetic markers trace to dates before secure social records for many of my family ‘lines. Specifically, my Y-DNA through Dad is stuck at 1744 in the pits of County Durham with William Burdon, a pitman, and Ann Hepple and my mtDNA through Mum in Southwark with Ann Tomkins, whose maiden name I haven’t yet found. These don’t really carry any existential payload but are a continuing puzzle to crack – as is that 10% French DNA. What is common to many of my nineteenth century ancestors, though, is deprivation and abject poverty, whether in mining villages or Southwark or dying of typhus in Maryport or in a pit roof collapse.
My point is that I first began to look at my family tree when my daughters were young precisely to give them some grounding identity and, cliché alert, some sense of deep roots.
A friend recommended Bodies on Netflix. The link is to the trailer which tells you everything you need to know. It is clever and involving with each time period well-resolved and each detective well-drawn and individual. Recommended.
I caught a snippet of Halo on line and was intrigued. It seems that fans of the games and books on which it is based do a lot of griping about it, but coming to it free of that baggage I found it diverting and entertaining. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it does what it does well.
Similarly, though for different reasons, Ad Astra had it’s critics. It is also sci-fi, but closer to Solaris, Arrival and 2001 in tone than to Star Wars. It features an excellent performance from Brad Pitt doing that hardest of things, delivering the lines with simplicity and clarity with no apparent attempt at ‘acting’. It sets out its metaphorical stall fairly explicitly and takes its time with its narrative, but it still held me rapt for 2 hours. Hans Richter’s score is superb.
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At the risk of being too soon about this, I’ve been reflecting on the death of Matthew Perry at aged 54 that was announced today. Perry knew that he would be remembered for Friends although he would have preferred to be remembered for his other work. He was right: the bulk of the eulogies I’ve seen today were for Friends. What has been on my mind is that I didn’t like Friends at all, apart from the theme song, and was never able to watch a complete episode. I found it neither engaging or funny. What I’ve been reflecting on is how, for whatever reason, I’ve been unable to share in what appears to be genuine grief on the part of many. Is it a generational thing?
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