Month: October 2020

Bread and Pheasants

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I have always thought there is a difference between urban and rural poverty – I only know about the rural side.

We lived in a village and we were sometimes broke, rather than always poor.

There were days when bread and eggs were it for an evening meal, my single mother coming in late from her job and the meal up to me and my sister to create. 

There isn’t too much you can do with eggs and bread, but those times taught me how to look in the fridge and make something out of what was there.

And I had been taught by my mother, who loved to cook and my grandmother whose definition of the heart of the home was to have something baking or bubbling.

We didn’t have food waste issues – we couldn’t afford it.

But we did have cooking skills and that made all the difference. If I had been taught to garden as well as I was taught to cook with whatever we could afford, I’d be opening the (currently a lot less than perfect) garden to the public. 

Currently only Steve, our lovely postman sees much of it. I rest my case.

There is a real difference between broke and poor.

If you are broke, it is a temporary situation and the chances are you have some food stocks – and to this day, when I am neither broke or poor, I have a stock of tinned tomatoes on the basis you can always start a meal with a tin of tomatoes.

(Once when I was living in a posh flat overlooking Tower Bridge, my mother came to stay and opened a cupboard to find my tinned tomato stash. Even she, a woman who knew a few things about making ends meet, thought I might have been a bit excessive in my stockpiling.)

If you were rural poor in my youth, you ate a lot of pheasant, apples, runner beans, potatoes.

Pheasants shot by neighbours or friends would be dropped on our step, vegetable gluts were shared around – we weren’t gardeners but looking back, we should have been.

Whilst a roast chicken was a special treat and my mother’s speciality, Viennese Beef, was only for high days and birthdays, pheasant was a regular. 

So, I am now rural and not poor or broke, or just managing, or dealing with loosing may job  but I have held on to my roots, and am now thinking about what to do with stale bread and a pheasant or two.

I have started volunteering at the Free Shop in Petersfield. (You can skip the next bit if you know about it – I have to say I didn’t until recently.

Anyway, we get food from the local supermarkets which is just at its best before date and gluts from gardeners and allotment holders, and people can come in and take what they want/need for free and that means it doesn’t get wasted.)

We get a lot of bread and I have been thinking about what to do with it. 

I made a bread pudding – rather dense and I am not sure that it has received ecstatic reviews but I will re-think the recipe.

This week, I am experimenting with a savoury bread and butter pudding.

Caramelised onions, tomatoes with herbs, bread and butter, eggs, milk, cheese. All layered and baked.

Meanwhile, yesterday, I was on an enjoyable village litter pick up organised by a ‘new’ local, and yes we got stuff out of ditches and hedges – nice rural areas apparently attract people who want to sit in a car, watch the sun go down and throw their empty bottles out of the window.

(Come and sit, chat, watch birds, do other much more exciting things in your car, but can you take your litter home?

Mind you if you did, what would us middle class people have as an excuse to socialise and be outraged at the same time.)

Anyway, I was talking to the man who organised said litter pick and he and his wife are thinking about setting up a project to get the ‘excess’ pheasants to people who needed a helping hand.

Now, I am not sure that the people who come into our Free Food Shop would pick up a pheasant but I bet they would if it was in a pie or a casserole….

So, for that we need a fridge, and I have possibly got to move from hygiene level 2 to 3 – watch this space.

This takes me back to my youth, so I am up for it.

I need to crowd fund a commercial fridge ( £1,000). I need to work it all out but I think it might work.

Anyone know about crowd funding – I’ve never done it before?

And before I forget – urban poverty…

Some years ago, I spent time with the CEO of Lewisham Council. We were talking about nutrition and food.

He told me to think about what it was like to live in a high-rise flat as a single parent, with two young children, to get to the bus stop with them, change buses and get to Tescos with two tetchy kids.

Then you could see that buying in bulk would be cheaper in the long run but you don’t have the money to buy in bulk.

You don’t have the ‘training’ to cook so it is all seriously hard work, and whatever you buy you have to take home on those buses with your kids.

How much easier it is to go to Costcutter and buy a pizza. 

And who could blame that parent.

Did I Tell You About My Holiday?

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I will start with the apology that we were lucky enough to be able to go to Florence and surrounding areas in September.

Now the apology is over, I can tell you some stuff about it.

So, as I was saying, we got to go to Italy when there were few other tourists – well there were some young German professionals who had driven down to Italy – some not so much working from home as working from the terrace of a pleasant agro-tourisma.

I could show off about the places we got to stay which we would never normally be able to afford or book. Shall I ? Oh, you look less than enthusiastic at the prospect of me boasting.

Are you sure you don’t want to see some photos? Really no? OK then, I will move on…

But just let me tell you this. Because there was no queue and not many people, there was space and time to look at some pictures. I won’t go on about the big stuff but look at this. Who’d have thought – Mark Rylance in the Uffizi.

Anyway, moving on, I am an atheist but the Best Beloved and I do like to visit a church. 

And there were some very fine examples in Italy ( did I mention we were there in September?…)

I do like a good fresco and some of them were very fine indeed.

This is the drunkenness of Noah. I didn’t know anything about this biblical story so I looked it up and it turns out there are various interpretations including this one which I find a bit hard to believe:

Another explanation offered is that Noah was after the cognitive powers that could be harnessed through alcohol, wanting to broaden his horizons in the study of Torah.

Now I know that whilst any one of us can believe that we are much more witty and erudite when we have had a drop too much – we would be wrong – but I can’t ever recalling anyone I know thinking that a gallon of wine was going to sharpen their brains to the point where they could study complex theological texts to get never before known insights.

Then there is this explanation:

Noah wasn’t trying to imbibe spirits to lift his own. He also wasn’t looking to drink in moderation to jump-start his brain. Noah’s plan from the beginning was to go all in, to get completely under-the-table, stripped-down-to-the-flesh plastered.

Having witnessed extreme depravity and immorality, and the destruction it left in its wake, Noah had come face to face with the consequences of sin. Noah got drunk (and subsequently disrobed) as an ambitious attempt to return the world to the innocent time before sin. He was trying to undo and reverse the negative effects of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden.

Really? Let’s get really drunk and drive out all sin. I think you need a stronger drug to be able to convince yourself of that.

Anyway, in the same church there was this lovely fresco marred only by the fact that Jospeh seems to be having his dream whilst covered by a rather cheap and nasty duvet cover. ( Sorry, if it  matches the one you love most.)

Indeed that duvet cover seems to have been all the rage with San Gimignano painters as look, here is another one.

(Job lot at the local Dunelm maybe.)

Now, this one is part of the decoration in a bedroom and the series of frescos  which are the equivalent of a wedding day photo album.

An interesting way to start your wedding day is apparently riding on your new husband’s back and beating him. I make no comment, but clearly the onlookers in the bird hide are somewhat surprised.

I am impressed he keeps his hat on throughout the whole series of events…..

I love this next one because that young man has clearly just remembered he has forgotten his mother’s birthday, or to renew his MOT, or any number of things we have all forgotten with Covid brains.

What exactly he is doing sitting at the bedside of someone who insists on wearing his hat of office in bed, is anyone’s guess.

I used to work for the National Rivers Authority and learned quite a bit about flooding – and the misery a flooded home – so I am interested in San Frediano and his rake.

This ex-Irish prince-come-hermit was appointed the bishop of Lucca.

( I can tell you of a lovely place to stay in Lucca if you wanted some holiday information, just saying.)

Anyway the good people of Lucca came to said bishop and asked if he could do anything about the flooding of the River Serchio and Fred ( as I am sure his friends called him) took a rake to the river’s edge.

The legend goes that he persuaded the river to follow his rake and took it away from the danger zone.

There are all sorts of things I could say about movement of water courses in flood plains and displaced water and canalising rivers and the impact and so on and so on. But I won’t bore you.

What I will say is that by the looks of the strapping lads and the work going on, the bishop was smart enough to get a few more flood resources to hand than just his rake.

And finally, there are times when you need a break from church visiting.

More on Aunt Jessie

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Just a quick re-cap: the Best Beloved and I have an autumn project to find out who Aunt Jessie was, and who painted her.

So, this is a long read and there is only one picture

Two strokes of luck and serendipity have got us this far:

Aunt Jessie was Jessamine Thompson, a dressmaker by profession, born 1874 and who died in a mental hospital in 1943.

She lived as head of the household with her brother James and sister Margaret, in Heaton and then by 1939, she was living alone in Jesmond.

We only ever knew her as Aunt Jessie, and had no other information except that she had come down the female line to my BB, and that his mother’s family were based in and around Newcastle.

Having posted about this, it turns out the BB’s niece was smart enough to ask her grandmother (Joan) about Aunt Jessie and to get her grandmother to write out that bit of the family tree – and was is more, she had kept it. 

This is what Caroline ( aforementioned niece – it may be hard to keep up with all these family links..) knows:

The picture is Jessimane Thompson. She is Joan’s actual Aunt. Sister of Joan’s mother Margaret Thompson. Daughter of James Thompson and Jane Ellen Watson who married in 1868. Jessimane never married. Her sister Elizabeth did and named her daughter Jessimane

Caroline also said her grandmother had said Aunt Jessie was clever and independent, and indeed she has that air about her.

Meanwhile, as they say, I was Googling trying to find out about the art scene in Newcastle in that period when I came across a really interesting leaflet called Artists in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne 1820 -1900.

Click to access 19c-Newcastle-artists.pdf

(We were pretty sure Aunt Jessie had been painted around the turn of the century judging by the clothes she wears – but what do we know…..)

Anyway, it was a really interesting read and as a long shot, I looked up the author, Gill Hedley, and sent her an email asking if she might be able to point me in the direction of research. 

I was thinking she might point me in the direction of an amateur art historian with an interest in the period who might be able to – well, actually I wasn’t sure what.

We have no signature on the painting as far as we have found yet, so identifying the artist and even their relationship is going to require research skills we have yet to discover in ourselves…

The other night, waiting for the kettle to boil as tea in bed with a good book is an essential, I was checking my emails and imagine my delight when I found this:

What a nice email to receive, especially prompted by something I wrote so very many years ago. 

I now write more or less full time, largely biographies, so this sort of research piques my interest. I’ll start by saying that it is a very nice painting. I have no instant idea of the artist but am happy to look a bit further. I have looked up Miss Thompson (what a lovely name, Jessamine) on an ancestry site and find she was a dressmaker born 1874, died 1943. Very sadly, that was in a mental hospital as I expect you know  Forgive me, if you did not. Perhaps she lost someone 1914-18. She lived with a brother and a sister in Heaton as an adult and was the head of the household. Then in 1939, she was on her own in Jesmond, where I grew up;  she was in a street very near where I lived when I wrote that leaflet.

I would guess the portrait was painted before the war, maybe 1910, but why? Did she have a friend who was a professional painter? Maybe the artist was a dressmaking client or his wife was? The artist and the sitter knew each other, clearly. This is not a commission.  Intriguing.

I will look at all the portraits in the Tyne and Wear museums collection to start with. These are all on the wonderful ARTUK website but I have it in print form which makes clicking through a bit easier.

How annoying to have no signature. Is there nothing on the back at all? Nothing to be seen anywhere on the front under a very strong raking light? You are safe to use spit on a soft cloth to enable a closer look in either bottom corner…socially distant, of course!

Anyway, your really long shot has found its aim and I will see what I can do.

 Best wishes

Gill

What a stroke of amazing luck to find someone who has much better things to do, willing to help.

If you have any doubt that Gill Hedley has better things to do than research Aunt Jessie, see here

https://www.gillhedley.co.uk

And I have found an art restorer who says she will have a look at Aunt Jessie and tell us what is needed to fix her up.

She said it was not necessarily all that common to sign a painting especially if the sitter and the painter knew each other well and the painter was not a big name.

So, even when we get the back off, we may be none the wiser.

I sent a photo to a Newcastle auctioneers to see if they can shed any light and got a reply saying portraits weren’t great sellers – if you don’t have any connection with the person, why have it, except to decorate a room in your B&B and who wants to pay much for that…

He said,

An excellent painting that unfortunately, may struggle to find a market.  Portraits are particularly difficult to sell.

Auction value is probably less than £60.  We would accept this for auction but you should consider carefully before proceeding.

I take this as meaning, please don’t put this into an auction ( not that we ever would.)

So, here we are so far.

But who was Elizabeth mentioned by Joan in her family tree conversation as we know that Jessamine had a sister Margaret ( mother of Joan) and a brother James who are in the records.

So, to add mystery. An ancestry site records an Elizabeth Thomson, daughter of James and Jane Ellen ( Jessamine’s parents’ names) and she was christened in September 1874.

Which is the same birth year as Jessamine.

But there is no mention of her except for Caroline’s record that she married and had a daughter which she named Jessamine….

And who painted Aunt Jessie?