the comfort of colour

The passing of the equinox means we cannot claim Summer anymore. Summer is on its last legs - has leaned into Autumn and from now the days get shorter. The tomato vines are straggling, the strawberries put out a last few berries and the apple tree is loaded. The quinces are heavy and going gold, the pear trees are feeding possums and cockatoos. In a way Autumn is more social than Summer. Everyone is back at school or work. Holidays already seem sketchy and only half remembered. Suddenly sleeves are rolled up. There is fruit to pick, jams and jellies to process, pie to roll pastry for... and after the haze of Summer heat the mornings are crisper, the sky clearer, the colours cleaner. The turning leaves, the cold starts and Wedgewood afternoon skies - this is the comfort of colour that Autumn offers.


With a bucket of homegrown Golden Delicious to hand and dinner guests tonight I pull down Jane Grigson's Good Things and thumb through. She has the authority of Elizabeth David with a less testy temperament. I feel friendlier towards her. She is smart, motherly and wistful in turns. My eye lights on Evreux apple tarts and I feel her at my elbow when she warns, "Do not be tempted to cook the tarts before the meal, or the juices will soak away into the pastry." How well she seems to know me. I would have cooked them early if only to admire them cooling on racks by the window.
Here is her recipe altered slightly to be baked as a galette.




Evreux apple tarts
At the Vieille Gabelle restaurant in Evreux, 55 miles to the west of Paris, they serve these tarts made with Golden Delicious apples. Do not be tempted to cook the tarts before the meal, or the juices will soak away into the pastry. Put them into a hot oven as you serve the first course, and baste once or twice with the apricot mixture.


shortcrust
8oz flour
5oz butter and lard mixed ( I used unsalted Danish butter only)
2 level tablespoons icing sugar
1 egg


creme patissiere
1 oz flour
2 egg yolks
1 egg
2 oz sugar
1/2 oz milk


apricot mixture
6 tablespoons apricot jam
2 tablespoons water


plus 
11/2 lbs Golden Delicious apples


Make the pastry and use it to line four straight sided patty pans, of about 4 1/2 inches diameter (from Woolworths). (I rolled 2 discs of pastry and lifted them into pie dishes leaving a generous overhang to be folded into on top of the fruit). Make the creme patissiere next: mix in a bowl the flour, egg yolks egg and sugar and stir in the milk which should have first be brought to just under boiling point. Cook over low heat until the custard is thick. Cool, then pour a 1/4 inch layer of it into the pastry cases.
Peel, core and cut the apples into1/8 inch slices. Halve the slices and arrange curved side up inthe creme patissiere, so that they resemble records gradely neatly in a rack.


Melt the apricot jam and water together, and sieve. Pour a little over the tarts. Cook in a hot oven, Mark 6-7, 400-427F, basting from time to time with the rest of the apricot mixture. The top edges of the apple should catch the heat and turn brown. Golden Delicious apples will not lose their shape, or disintegrate into white fluff as cookers do. When you cut into the tarts, a delicious aromatic juice bursts out. Serve plenty of cream with them.
from Jane Grigson Good Things illustrated by M J Mott, London, 1971, 2007

festival of broken needles

Hand sewing slows the heart it seems. Or it does mine. Perhaps like writing longhand it cannot be done at speed. Begs not to be. One stitch, one breath. The rhythmic dip and dive of the long nose, round eyed needle lets the thoughts lift loose. And the heart feels unburdened. Sometimes hand sewing is more a joy than a job.

A needle is a fine tool. Simple, portable, industrious. But what to do if it breaks? If it is bent and no longer able to sew true? Thank it. Lament it. Offer comfort. Japanese women do. For hundreds of years Japanese women have honoured their needles and pins on Hari-Kuyo. On February 8 women take their tired needles and worn out pins to Shinto or Buddhist shrines and lay them to rest in the Festival of Broken Needles. Bent pins and broken needles are made to lie down on a soft bed specially sewn or plunged into cakes of bean curd. Softness comforts the needles and pins who before have known only sharpness. Sutras are said to thank the needles for their hard work, for a year of straight stitches, for repairs, for their sorrows inherited direct from the seamstresses hand.

Last night I saw a fox step out of the darkness. Kitsune - the Shinto messenger - a good omen, I thought, for burying needles. I made my bent pins and one broken needle a bed stitched with sashiko, plumped with fleece - a button and spare thread for company. I thanked them and then I laid aside sewing for the day.

If the fox came for them he would be able to carry the soft parcel in his mouth with ease - no booby trapped tofu to choke on.

"Oh my needle, how sad! You were a special gift, beyond the ordinary, prominent among all ironware. Deft and swift like some knight errant, straight and true like a loyal subject, your sharp point seemed to talk, your round eye seemed to see."

from Lament for a Needle.  Anon Choson dynasty, Korea.

the ground beneath

After a few too hot days at home scratching away at my journal, sewing, mooching among the bookshelves, tidying up a little fretfully, not feeling hungry but still thinking about food - I realised that I had cabin fever and I had to get out. The past few weeks I had been sewing - mending, patching, darning - and somehow that led to stitching cloth in a sort of dream - an unthinking meditation. I had been reading too about zokin - Japanese dusters, or cleaning cloths - repurposed material from clothes cut down and quilted together with tiny running stitches - a humble sashiko. These days it seems zokin are made only by the elderly, by women old enough to have memory of hard times, young enough to still want to do something with their hands. That is me, I thought, neither old or young - some time on my hands. I made three - quilted in different patterns - my sewing both inexpert and somehow satisfying hand work. When cabin fever finally struck I took myself into the city to buy proper sashiko thread, a Japanese leather thimble - worn just above the joint on long man - the middle finger. In an arcade upstairs in a tiny shop I found all kinds of sewing treasures. Stowing my sweet purchases in my basket I took out my stitching and showed the shop's owner Leanne. Leanne lived in Japan for many years and studied all kinds of traditional arts including sashiko. She was not really impressed with my work but gave me some helpful advice. I had pulled my stitches too tight,(story of my life) and had begun by quilting several layers together,(running before I could walk) - not good for a beginner. I blushed and took my leave. 
Sometimes I forget that the whole is made of many fragments. I forget that the journey can be at once humble and grand. I forget for a moment that I am a snail and that slow is my natural speed. Why I try to shuck this perfect rhythm I'm not sure. The years fly - sometimes it's good to have days that are slow. 


Memorandum: If you are in Melbourne the shop mentioned is Kimono House on the second floor of the Nicholas Building. It is an Aladdin's Cave of beautiful textiles and sewing tools. Kimono House offers courses in a variety of disciplines including sashiko. I have signed up for one.

last to leave

Sometimes being a land lubber is more humbling than usual.
Just on twilight - the last light on the last day of the year dragonflies swarmed overhead. The hot weather, the windless, cloudless conditions might have brought on this frenzy. Maybe there was an inaudible - to us - hum of insect activity that alerted the dragonflies to a possible feast. The aerial spectacular - not unlike film of a World War I air battle - took less than half an hour.  Darkness came on fast then. 


Last one out switches off the light.

cherry time

Cherries are an early Christmas present in the antipodes - their colour is a cheer - their sweetness something between a fruit and a perfume. Our Stella is only five years old - we have had it in the ground for three. Even the first year after a dry Spring we had cherries. Just a handful. Mark harvested that first fruit on his knees.

This year the rains have come after an absence of ten or more years. Some children have be born into this testy climate, never knowing until now a Spring downpour or Summer storm. And Winter rain? Winter what? No-one has carried umbrellas for years. No-one owns a raincoat anymore. We had a collie dog who looked a her first rain with utter amazement. Good rains have meant plump, rosy fruit and plenty. We netted the trees and still the birds got some. It is their due and hey, we are happy to share. My friend Jan looked at our little orchard - the trees each neatly under nets and called them ghost trees. To me they are upside-down skirts. To the dogs they are curious and require peeing on. 


In this corner of the country cherries are the season's first stone fruit. They flag the early days of advent and the end of exams. Nothing says Summer quite like sitting on the verandah, spitting cherry pits and idling away an afternoon.

birds eye view

British sports journo Simon Barnes also writes about birds. From his "How to be a Bad Birdwatcher", I learnt two cardinal (no pun intended)rules. Firstly, any small, brown, mystery sighting can be recorded as an LBJ - (little brown job. Most of my bird list could be described thus. Seeing birds on the wing means seeing them backlit. And seeing them this way means recognising a siloquette rather than colour or markings. So LBJ is a neat classification for all those thrilling but perplexing sightings. But seeing birds is more than identification don't you think? For me it's about the witness of wildness.It's proof that the world even in the cities is more than just humdrum people business.

Secondly, says Barnes, buy small bins - the rider being that they be good ones. He suggests a pair of Leicas. I noted the model, hunted them down, raised them to my eyes and felt that I was really seeing for the first time in my life. It was as though everything I had laid eyes on up to that moment had been witnessed through a fog - a pea soup, a fug, a smoke, an opacity. I trained them on the spire of a church, middle distance and picked out with exquisite clarity a clutch of sparrows - their markings, face masks, scaly legs sharp and true. Walking back to the counter I asked the price as casually as I could. The answer left a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye.

Today most of my sightings are still LBJs.

our bird is back

Well, it could be that our dead bird was not our bird.

A day after finding the body I notice that there is still bird activity in the olive tree. There are comings and goings and all the zen-like business of egg sitting.

A month later there is a chick. Just one - not two as I had expected. He is a mess of a bird to begin with. The feathers are spindly, rudimentary affairs of fluff and spines that do not lie flat. He looks surprised to be alive.

His mother is fattening him. He is calling and trying his stunted chicken wings.

Spring tips into Summer and he tries to fly. I will be watching him almost as closely as his mother - heart in my mouth.

He is all uncertainty and adventure.