My sister, and my music

It's coming up for a year since my sister died. Quite apart from the constant amazement I wake up with at the speed with which the second worst year of my life has slid by (the worst year of my life was the year leading up to her death. Nothing takes your breath and energy away like total and utter helplessness. Grief is a terrible thing, but I think helplessness might be worse), I am increasingly visited by strange dreams that feature her, and as I commute to and from work, music plays over and over in my head. All this music is associated with my sister. In our teens she was a massive fan of disco music. Some of it I have on my IPod. Some of what I have on my IPod I have listened to over this last year and really enjoyed. Earth Wind and Fire. Michael Jackson, Smoky Robinson, Imagination. Some of it has made me smile with memories of my teenagehood with her. Donna Summer. Oops Upside Your Head. Some of it has reduced me to helpless tears. Try having three sisters, losing one, and then listening to Sister Sledge performing We Are Family....I Got All My Sisters With Me. I used to love dancing around the floor with both of my sisters when that track was played. These days if I do hear it on the radio by chance I just feel bitter. Well aren't YOU the bloody lucky ones having all your sisters with you. I don't have all mine with me any more. That song just sounds smug to my ears now. It's not fair. How come Sister Sledge gets to keep all their sisters? Or Madonna singing the track Jump. My sisters and me, my sisters and me...right now it feels like a conspiracy by divas to emphasise my loss.  And some of it is so painful that I can't listen to it at all, though equally I can't bear to erase it from my online collection. These are songs she loved that I don't like at all, but I downloaded them to feel closer to her. Shakatak. Shalimar. Heatwave. Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand singing No More Tears. Bill Withers. Ain't No Sunshine When You're Gone....music has always been a potent evoker of emotion. Any decent musician worth their downloads knows that. I've always been musical as well as a fan of music. This is the first time music has played such havoc with my emotions though. How is it possible that music can be so duplicitous? So uplifting and inspiring one moment, so motivating another, so flipping depressing seconds after that? Presumably because good music mirrors life. Let's be honest. This last year has been awful and has been hard, and next year will also be awful and will also be hard, and so will many years after that. But this year has also held many joys. Milestones in the lives of the younger people in our family, including my sister's kids. Great holidays. Canoeing down the River Wye in South Wales was a personal highlight. No space for grief when you're fighting to keep your canoe afloat in strong headwinds. Contrary to what the movies tell you, you don't spend the year after a bereavement in hiding. Life is inexorable and takes you with it.

Smashed eggs

I did a supermarket shop today. Supermarket shops are never, ever an inspiring chore, particularly after two weeks of enthusiastic foraging for berries and plums in my street and local woods. There is something irresistibly Lara Croft Tomb Raider about plunging into brambles with a tupperware box in pursuit of the perfect blackberry, which gives you some idea of how often I experience adventure in my life. But supermarket shops have to be done, principally because tins of baked beans are not to be found in my local brambles, and as I am more than usually bored, I pick a cart that is just a bit too small for my mound of shopping and on the way out, my box of 12 organic large free range eggs tips sideways and falls out, on to the concreted road, right in the middle of a zebra crossing, so that the whole thing happens under the amused stare of waiting car drivers. Hum. What to do. Well, the average shopper would probably leave them there. But then the average shopper also throws half smoked cigarette butts out on to the street without stubbing them out, never mind finding a bin to put them in. The average shopper throws recipts out of the car and tickets out of bus doors just before they close. The average shopper reads the Standard or Metro and then stuffs them behind their heads or throws them on to an empty seat before leaving the train. I am not the average shopper, so I stoop and pick up the box. The top looks pristine. The bottom feels damp. I have a dodgy cart, one with a malfunctioning wheel (aren't they all) and the idea of trying to about turn the contraption with my oozing box of eggs so I can return them to the shop and plead extenuating circumstances in the hope of securing a replacement box, is just too much for me. I'd have relished the argument actually (if you WILL make your carts too small for my purchases!! - I really should have become a lawyer...) but the car drivers are getting restless. So I push the cart on with my damp egg box perched on top, I take it home, pull it out, put it in the sink and examine the damage. Twelve eggs. Only two have survived. I make myself a cup of tea and think about the other ten. I go to my cupboards and haul out round cake tins and my usual baking paraphernalia. I have had an idea. Which cakes use loads and loads of eggs? Cheesecakes. Who is the queen of cheesecakes? Nigella. I pull out her cookbook (I don't own many - why bother, with a billion food recipes at your disposal with the tap of a finger on the IPad?) but I have always treasured How To Be A Domestic Goddess. In it I find a recipe for a New York cheesecake that I have somehow missed. This recipe calls for 6 eggs. Perfect. I make it. Cheese, sour cream, cornflour, sugar, vanilla, loads of whipped up egg whites, and egg yolks and a biscuit base, and it bakes in the oven for an hour, and then it sits in the oven for a further two hours, and then it sits outside the oven for yet another hour. In fact, it takes half a day from start to finish. But it is so light and fluffy and brilliant, and I still have 4 smashed eggs to use up. So I deliver this one to my neighbour over the road who has recently had an operation and is at home recuperating, and I pad back to my kitchen, and I start all over again. Two cheesecakes. You see? Smashed eggs are not a disaster. They are merely cakes, waiting to be born.

Blackberry sorbet

I foraged for blackberries at the weekend. Actually I got distracted en route to the blackberry brambles down by my local brook, by a plum tree in the middle of my street dropping its ripe fruit left right and centre on the ground, to the delight and ecstasy of our local ant population, who by the looks of things were holding several celebrations in honour of this unexpected fruitfest. I ran back to the house, dug out a ladder and a large cardboard box, lugged both back to the tree, climbed precariously to the top of the ladder so I could reach the ripest of the plums - the ones at the top of the tree, which had had the benefit of the most sun to fatten and juice up - and a few minutes later I had a box full of beautful plump plums, which I lugged away triumphantly while the ants went into mourning. This gives you an idea of how determined a forager I can be. Blackberries are the devil to pick. They are probably the best protected wild fruit I can think of. You want blackberries? Prepare for battle. Of course if you are content with the tiny malnourished ones at the front, be my guest. Me, I want the ones with nodules the size of grapes, which are always tantalisingly, tortuously, just out of reach, at the top of the bramble heap, or at the very back, or, slightly counterintuitively, buried deep beneath the thorns. So you need a game plan. First, dress for battle. Tough jeans, wellington boots, long sleeves. Second, find your weapon. In this case, a very long stick. Third, bring something to put the blackberries in that can hook over your stick as you need both hands for this - one to pick the fruit, the other to wield the stick. See? Years of experience and thousands of superficial thorn scratches have given me this knowledge. I spend hours in the bushes reaching as far as I can for the best that there are. Later on at home I regard my tub of blackberries with the same hilarious sensation I experience every August after a foraging afternoon. What the hell to do with it all? I could freeze them, but the problem is, and you will know this if you are a regular reader of this blog, that my freezer is already stuffed with forest fruits that I picked at a PYO farm just a couple of weeks ago. So why pick these blackberries? Well, why not, really. They were there. Now I need to work out how not to waste them. I'm not a huge fan of pies and crumbles aren't massively popular with the family so I need a plan B. and I find it on the internet, as you find most things, having typed in a google question along the lines of, what can I do with my surfeit of blackberries. And up pops a recipe for blackberry sorbet. I create sugar water, which I chill. I take it out of the fridge after a couple of hours. Blitz all my blackberries, the entire haul, in a food processor, add them to the sugar water, stir. Add lemon, and in my case, because by now I have departed from the recipe, as I often do as ideas occur to me while I stir or pound, I add cassis. I strain the lot through a metal sieve, dispose of the blackberry goo and put the by now gothic ruby coloured liquid into the freezer. Take it out after around 90 minutes, blitz in the food processor, return to the freezer. Leave another 90 minutes, Take it out again, blitz it again. I should put it back in the freezer but it looks so fluffily beautiful that instead I call my family whose antennae have already registered that a baking session is in full flow and who therefore are not tardy in their response. We spoon the half done sorbet. It's delicious. It's sweet and a bit tart and smooth and rich and fluffy. We have to stop ourselves before we've eaten half of it. I drag us away from it and return it to the freezer. I dream about it overnight. We'll have it tonight for dessert. If it survived breakfast.

New Beginning? New Clothes.

My niece has just secured herself a place at university. She has worked really hard for this and truly deserves her success. After the initial whooping of joy and the communal backslapping and booking of halls accommodation, the next question was, what to wear? Never mind, do I need cups/ obligatory jar of Nescafe for random students who drop by at 4am/ folders for my work/ memory sticks, decent book bag, or a map of the city. No. My niece has more clothes than I have ever had in my entire life but she thinks she needs "university clothes" and I agree with her. She does. Not because she lacks the jeans, t shirts, sweaters, trendy boots etc etc that all go with your first year at Uni, giving way after the first term to a universal university fashion statement known simply as Grunge, which I take to mean, clothes you own that you deliberately do not wash for so long that they stick together and you fish them out of your cupboard on a stick in one big lump. She needs them because this is a new beginning. And new beginnings are an opportunity to redefine yourself, to liberate yourself from your previous look and invent a Whole New You. I recently applied for and was offered a new job. I'm really excited about starting it, which will be sometime in October. I'm doing all the responsible things, like poring over my induction reading, getting to know who is who and working out where the bogs are BEFORE I start work so I don't find myself in the horribly, Britishly embarrassing position of Having To Ask For Directions. I'm also spending some time in the evenings mulling over My New Look. The place I am moving to is a bit more trad, a bit more Establishment, the building is echoey with mosaic floors in some places, and there is a sense of musty awe about some parts of it. I have more than a passing feeling that my glittery neon blue t shirt dress is going to struggle to mesh with its new corporate environment. Should I invest in a dogtooth check suit with a pussy bow blouse, I wonder. Every fibre of my being revolts against the idea. Surely I can go Establishment without ageing my look by at least 20 years? OK then how abouts suits and separates with interesting twists? Grey dresses with bright tights and clashy jewellery? Suits with fab retro white lace ups? Now you're talking. I take a dispassionate look at my wardrobe. I fish out my mustard, fuschia, neon blue and burnt orange tights and lay them out on the bed, imagining suits and dresses that they would jazz up. I pull out my stretchy kitten heel boots and picture myself sitting in committees doing a Theresa May impression (yuk yuk. Lose the kitten heel boots). Over these coming days the look will continue to evolve as my niece and I peruse the Autumn fashions and select the pieces which will define the New Her and the New Me. In the end what we buy will more or less hit the mark of our new environments. Much more importantly, whether they do or don't, they will form the backdrop of our new beginnings. That is why hunting them down is so important. And so exciting. Bring on the changing rooms.

Not all Men are predatory sexist bastards. Just a lot of them.

It is just not easy being a woman. It really isn't. I am talking about the social experience here, not the biological, about which my kids would say (both of them boys, by the way) that there is already Too Much Information. I am talking about the daily sexism you experience in your car, walking up the street, in a shop, at the gym...anywhere. Here is my experience of the morning. Just this morning, mind. In my car, I am hooted at rudely at a T junction by a car behind me. It is a BMW convertible and the guy behind cannot understand why I am waiting for the traffic to pass. He wants me to pull out and make them stop. I am a meek observer of the Highway Code, on account of the inherent illegaility of driving under any other rules, and besides I see he has a dent in the front right corner of his car, while mine is intact, and given his behaviour I think there is probably enough proof to demonstrate that the Highway Code was not invented for nothing. So I continue to wait until the road is clear and then I begin to pull out. But this man has had enough waiting so he drives alongside me, pulls out in front of me, blocking me in and narrowly missing a bus, which pulls on the brakes, throwing the passengers around the interior. They appear to pick themselves up calmly. London commuters are, after all, accustomed to such driving. The BMW driver then slows down in front of me, forcing me to slow down. The man puts his hand out of the window and makes the all too predictable rude gesture. I smile and wave graciously, a la Queen Elizabeth, which I know from experience will infuriate him further, so I also check that my doors are locked and windows are down. Previous experiences of this have ended in the maddened bloke jumping out of the car and hammering on my window trying to get in for a good throttling. Or perhaps worse. So. I drive on to the gym giving this man little more than a few second's thought. At the gym I am midway through a range of tortuous floor exercises which Matt Roberts, famous trainer with ridiculously toned body that suggests he may not have much of a personal life, assures me in his freebie Mail on Sunday pullout, will nuke the paunch. I don't believe this for a minute, but I do like to vary my exercise so I am giving this a whirl, and it's bloody hard, so I am huffing and puffing. I hear a small noise and I look up. A bloke who is balancing on a large exercise ball while lifting unfeasibly large weights, is whistling at me. He has been appreciating the view of my cleavage that the exercise I am doing has been affording him. I look at him neutrally, turn 90 degrees, and finish my set. On my way home I stop to buy bread. There is a small queue of 3 or 4 people - this is a popular bakery which opens at the crack of dawn and half the borough buys its breakfast there en route to the office - but this does not stop two labourers from walking past me and calling to one of the staff who they refer to as "girl". They take a minute to stare at my breasts before sauntering off with their supersize me croissants. I complete my purchase and leave. That was my morning, all before 9am, before I had even sat down to my own breakfast.  That, frankly, is a snapshot of my daily life in terms of interactions I have not sought or invited or encouraged, welcomed or responded to, from random strange men. Twitter Trolls? That is scraping the surface.

Pick Your Own

I used to go to farms to pick strawberries regularly throughout the Summer when I was young. I grew up in Essex where I have a memory of loads of PYO choices, and given that this was pre-internet, when Steve Jobs was barely out of nappies (that is an exaggeration as Steve Jobs was older than me, but you get the comparative picture right?), choices for family entertainment on a Sunday afternoon looked very different back in the day. My family used to bundle us in the car and head to Southend, or to a stately home (I LOATHED the stately homes, as any tomboy girl might, but absolutely loved the bit where we pitched camp in the grounds, played cricket and stuffed ourselves with sandwiches). And PYO was another of those activities. We would bring back ridiculous mountains of strawberries and my poor Mum would then spend the remainder of the day making months and monthsworth of jam out of it. She claimed she enjoyed it. I'll take her at her word. I left Essex when I went to university and never came back except for family visits. I settled in another part of London, had my kids, and totally forgot about PYO. A few times we would be in the car in Suffolk, Somerset or Devon and see a PYO sign, exclaim to each other, and proceed to drive past it. But this week it is the school Summer hols, one of my kids is in Wales at a Summer camp dressing up in togas and playing war games with paintball if the Twitter pictures are a reliable guide to his activities, leaving my other kid at home with me. On a whim I googled PYO to see if there were any nearby and discovered one a 20 minute drive away. So we hopped in the car and pitched up at a massive farm with acres and acres of fruit and vegetables. So huge was this place that we lost ourselves in the raspberry canes, emerging hours later with suspiciously pink looking mouths. In spite of my early memories and my silent exhortations to keep it all in proportion I did what everyone does when they go to a PYO, which is, to have a kind of brainstorm and go completely nuts with the gathering baskets. An hour or so later we had about a year's worth of blackberries, raspberries and strawberries to weigh and pay. I wanted redcurrants but we didn't have the space for them. I thought we might make it to the sweetcorn fields and carry back one under each arm. That's how obsessive I got. What is it about PYO that does this to you? And, a bit like when you buy souvenirs on holiday that look so great in their natural surroundings, or that dress you saw in the window and went so mad for you didn't bother to try it on, you just ran in and bought it and brought it home covetously, we unloaded our fruit mountain on to the kitchen surface, where it looked, well, like a mountain of fruit we were going to have to find a place for. Ah but if you are an afficionado of PYO you will know that there is so much more fun to be had out of your overspecified fruit gathering than mere JAM! I rolled up my sleeves, stuck Kiss FM on the radio very loudly, and set about pulling out my baking implements, my flour, sugar and butter, and I was off. First , an Eton Mess, creamy and sparkly and pink with strawberry juice from our warm, ripe strawberries that I whizzed in the food processor, chopping up another load roughly, combining the lot with my whipped cream and homemade vanilla meringues. I contemplated an addition of alcohol and decided this fruit was so yummy and beautiful it needed to be left to speak for itself. Next a raspberry pound cake, studded with raspberries so huge they looked like pink spaceships. Then a blackberry and apple tart, 9 tenths blackberries culled from our haul. And finally the best bit. Freezer bags, into which went the tautest and plumpest of our fruit, washed and hulled. Zip the bag almost shut. Put a straw in. Suck all the air out to create a vaccuum pack. Zip the remainder shut and chuck in the freezer. That is if you manage to do the sucking bit without laughing yourself silly, as my child and I did so often we ended up accidentally mashing half our fruit (which then became smoothie fodder). Pick Your Own. It carries a wealth of possibilities. I am going back there right now for the sweetcorn.