I haven’t written anything for so long that I am feeling rusty, and didn’t really want my return to be a plague diary – but hey ho.

Oxfam is closed, so all those lovely books ( and indeed the not so lovely ones – Jeremy Clarkson included) will be sitting there waiting for new homes for some time to come (perhaps not Jeremy Clarkson…)

Meanwhile, we usually are fans of hunkering down.

And usually that comes with winter and log fires and telly and the dog asleep on some piece of furniture, a stew in the Aga and friends for a long Sunday lunch.

Now it comes with all the above except it is Spring, and we can’t have anyone in the house.

We are the really privileged and I am seriously aware of that – we can afford to be where we are with no financial worries, we have a decent sized garden and are surrounded by fields.

But these are jittery times, strange times, no point of reference times, the calm before the storm times.

The times when you watch what is happening in Italy and marvel at the efforts being made to save lives and at the same time hope you never need to ask that for yourself or people you know.

I’d like to think this was bringing out the best in me but just like my inner cleaner, I am finding it quite hard to locate by better inner self at the moment.

But here are two things that made my day:

My lovely next door neighbour managed by a slip of the cursor to get 4 kilos of carrots in her Ocado order.

In a few weeks time she’d probably be able to sell those on some black market for shares in Zoom, but right now she has given me some.

My BB, never knowingly cooking a thing in his life, and who has a sweet tooth which he has been nurturing for all his years, did not seem to run through the options of soup, purees, carrot curry ( but then who would?) and came up instantly with carrot cake. (Recipes that don’t involve cream cheese all welcome.)

We are also about to spend some happy hours filling envelopes with advice and support stuff from our Parish Council for the locals, and another lovely neighbour offered to help.

Now normally, I would have flapped my hands and asked half the village in to help but had to say that we would manage.

She said, it would all go better with a glass of wine and I said, we should have stocked up with more of the white stuff – ten minutes later, a lovely bottle was delivered to our doorstep.

That will make today fine. Hope yours is too.

I am not sure that I want this to turn into an Oxfam-meets-cooking-blog, though maybe that would give it a niche following, but I have to say those two themes seem to be coinciding a lot.

And more to the point, the authors are mysterious.

So, here goes on cookery writer number 2.

Last week someone donated books from clearing out a family home – her mother’s, parents’, another relative – I am not sure. I was not on ‘duty’ just passing and having a chat with my colleague when she came in so I helped her in with her boxes of donations.

She pointed to a book and said, ‘You should look at the last recipe.’

I put the book aside to have a look at when I was next properly in the shop. ( And, luckily, it was still there when I did.)

And this is the last recipe:

And yes, I am not sure either whether children loved that teaspoonful and asked for more….

At this point, I should tell you, reader, this book is worth nothing in monetary terms.

It is not old enough to be valuable, it is not a ‘real’ recipe book, it is not written by anyone famous, it is a little bit of social history.

But it is interesting.

So, how come the ‘Recipe Book For Cooking’ ( and you do have query the possibility of a recipe book not for cooking, but moving on..) by Miss F Tharle dated 1935 has the first recipe dated 1934?

(Clearly, she was a jelly fan.)

In fact you have to go 15 pages to find a recipe dated 1935 and, by the way, except for two recipes – cheese soufflé and cheese straws –  the rest in those pages are all for sweet stuff.

We have Strawberry Soufflé, Coconut Cakes, Eclairs, Lemon Sponge, and more, before we get to Casseroled Chicken.

There are 68 pages before Miss F Tharle stops, and most of those are for anything you might fancy as a pudding, cake, dessert or just to satisfy your sweet tooth.

But what I can’t quite get is why a recipe ( Sponge Cake ) is dated 1935 on the page before one ( Brandy Trifle) dated 1934?

And the handwriting seems to be from different people. 

After Casseroled Chicken, the dating of the recipes stops, until Apricot Fancies on page 56 which is dated 1943, then Fruit Biscuits a few pages on, dated 1946, and much to my surprise, over the page, Lemon Cream, dated 1939.

Mind you, the Old Testament Cake on the previous page did catch my eye. No explanation of what to do – is that Biblical or what?

And the penultimate ingredient – 2 cups reduced to 2 teaspoonfuls of something I can’t make out.

So, from the book’s beginning in 1934/5 nowWorld War II has broken out, has been carrying on, and there are signs of it. 

(Personally potatoes are a big favourite, so points 1 to 4 are fine with me.)

Then the book has blank pages until at the back you come across another’s handwriting and interestingly, a conversion chart from American to British measurements.

And then the recipes are largely cut out from newspapers – ‘Recipes of Quality Collected by Lady Muriel Beckwith’ feature heavily.

Gone are the days of Chocolate and Vanilla Biscuits  and Apricot Fancies (1943), we are now looking at Game Hot-Pot and Canard Aux Olives.

Like all personal recipe books, there are a pile of bits and pieces shoved in at the back and interestingly, there are a number which are labelled NAAFI.

And reminders of the past, and that jelly is something to be enjoyed:

And even these paper doilies ( not a word I expected to be typing in 2019) are in the back – just put there by someone expecting to use them sometime soon…..

I have no idea who the author(s) of this little piece of culinary and social history are.

No doubt they are women. Were they related? How come the book has gone from one to the other?

Did all the people involved have a very sweet tooth?

Given that this book has come to us in Petersfield, not 50 miles from Brighton, and is a book of very largely, very sweet recipes, I do just wonder if Ruby Bran has anything to do with this book.

And I do just wonder whether the translation of American and British measurements meant at least one of our authors was a GI bride. If so, she left her cookery book behind and I am very grateful to have seen it.

PS Melting Moments:

So, if you read the previous blog you will have seen me raise a quizzical eyebrow at the woman who said she was so looking forward to village life where everyone was equal and everyone joined in everything….

More vignettes from the village festivities:

One:

A stallholder arriving and asking where was her chair, her table ( neither of which she had asked for/ordered/paid for) her help to get stuff from her car, and someone to help erect her gazebo ( none of which we have people on hand just waiting to do) and, by the way, where was Tim. 

‘Tim’ I asked, ‘Do you mean Tim running the bookstall? because I think he is sorting books.’ 

‘No,Tim my son’

‘I’m sorry I don’t know your son.’

‘Really? you don’t know Tim. Have you lived here long?’

‘Nine years.’

‘Well, when you see him, please send him to me immediately.’

Two:

Most of the village street has pavements either side but there is a stretch with houses and no pavements, and that makes it difficult to walk into the village without flattening yourself against a wall as posh cars on their way to Goodwood, or indeed many other vehicles on their way somewhere or another, come through.

At 8 am as the street was closed, a man stepped down into the road and stated painting his wall.

‘Nice day for it’ we said as we walked past.

‘The only bloody day for it’ he said.

Three:

A phone call at 9pm a day or two before the festivities.

‘Just checking you can organise me a lift.’

It turned out the caller was a man who sells homemade stuff and lives in the outskirts of the village and is no longer allowed to drive.

I was not sure that organising a pick up was in my remit but the Best Beloved said he’d do it.

Delivered, and set up, and sold out by early afternoon, I decided it was best to get the man home safely.

Called my Best Beloved who was on the Downs with the dog and asked him to come and get the chutney man.

A few minutes later BB called to say he had fallen and badly sprained his ankle so no, he couldn’t do pick ups and deliveries.

So, now I had a man waiting for a lift home, and an injured husband.

I grabbed the son of friends, handily having a nice time at the event and not looking like he was about to do anything important, and asked that he would walk man down the street, wait with him whilst I got my car, and I would collect him, deliver him home and then drive to find my injured BB.

He did that with a lovely good grace and all was done.

Man was delivered hime safely. BB delivered home, bag of peas on his ankle and me back to the festivities.

Now, if I tell you that the badly sprained ankle turned out to be a pretty serious and unusual injury and needed two hours of surgery to fix, there was various and somewhat eccentric other stuff around the homemade stuff man which involved a mysterious bottle of martini, you might begin to think, ‘there is more to running a village festivities than I would have imagined’ and you’d be right.

I was at a supper recently when one of the guests said she couldn’t wait to leave the ‘hustle of town life for a village where the community is so much more cohesive, and everyone joins in.’

Two thoughts went through my mind: she was talking about leaving Petersfield (Hampshire market town, population 13,000, one Waitrose, four bookshops, a real market twice a week, a thriving am dram scene….) not exactly London, New York, Tokyo….

And secondly, village life has more social strata than a sedimentary cliff face – and no, not everyone joins in.

We know this on both counts, us who do join in and organise the village festivities.

So, for those of you not familiar with our festivities, let me set the scene:

The village main street is closed on the late May Bank Holiday and along it there are stalls, entertainments, the pub is packed, there is human fruit machine, a barbecue and other food and a carousel and trampoline, a very lucrative bottle stall … .

This is a couple of members of the music trio and stallholders patronising the tea stall before we opened.

Then, behind the street there is a dog show, sheep shearing, people dressed up in the costumes of the 17the century, archery, a splendid and extensive pop-up bookshop which is called the bookstall but you need to think 1,000 books not just a few…

Just before the festivities open, there is a march by members of The Old Club, with a local brass band along the street and back and that opens the event.

( That morning they have walked the bounds of the village and brought hazels and willows to decorate the street ends.)

This is all organised by a small group, and to claim a modicum of respectability, we call ourselves a committee. 

Let me give you  two vignettes which might prove my points about village life:

One :

Last year, I took over the management of the stalls on the street.

My predecessor had been doing this for several years before he left the village and, in handing over to me, he said ‘you spend a lot of time and a lot of emails making sure it works on the day.’ He was right.

I was very nervous and, being me not him who did it more or less by himself, I roped in two great, efficient and organised women ( first rule: make sure your deficiencies are covered) to make sure we had a plan of what went where and how it worked. 

And one day, whilst nipping to the shop to get a few things, I bumped into a neighbour from over the road. 

I asked her if she might be willing to give up a couple of hours first thing on the morning to help get the stallholders in the right place, with their cars off the street in good time etc etc.

(Detail not my strong point but throwing up my hands and asking for all sorts of help – now that’s my forte.)

She said yes – and I was very pleased. 

Anyway, on the day my carefully drawn plan was just a bit lacking in detail (a few stalls forgotten) but generally it worked. ( see above.)

The neighbour turned up, with her husband, at 8am, to do a couple of hours – and they were still there to do the clearing up at 8pm that night.

So, now she is one of those who joined in and is in charge of traffic marshalling and do you know what, it was very well organised this year.

(PS I heard that my predecessor drew up his plan of the stalls’ whereabouts the night before after having a few pre-Festivities drinks and again, do you know what, apparently, it worked fine…)

Two:

In order to be able to shut the main street for a day, we have to ensure that emergency vehicles have another route through.

Which in turn means we have to have marshalls at either end of the street to re-direct people – despite the signs people want to ask someone which way to go.

So, my in-charge neighbour was at one end of the street making sure cars were diverted when a woman approached with a car full of plants for the plant stall – she was at least a hour later than was specified by my email for getting vehicles unloaded and away from the street.

Now, the plant stall is a great seller and are usually cleared out by lunchtime – all locally grown and organised by the village horticultural society, so generally a good thing but some of the people who run it do seem to think they are exempt from the rules which work, apparently, perfectly well for the rest of us.

The driver was told she couldn’t go through because she had arrived after the street was shut, and every stallholder had been told to get their goods and cars off early before the march – and so she would have to park elsewhere.

The driver said (rudely) she was having none of that and drove at my marshalling friend, just by-passing her, and parked where she fancied.

There is a strata, or should it be stratum, of villagers who clearly view the hardworking volunteers running the festivities as the lower orders.

Welcome to village life.

There is nothing like being laid low to make a month disappear leaving little sign of any activity whatsoever if you exclude the (rather enjoyable) gorging on afternoon antiques programmes.

So, that took care of part of January and February and then March has just galloped past trying to catch up with all that stuff left to take care of itself – and of course, it didn’t.

Anyway, the bookshop is back under control ( more or less) and I have started to look at my lists of six things.

As the big birthday is now past, time to complete some of these things is galloping away too.

And, always a woman who has bright ideas but no commitment to follow-through, I do feel that this is the year when I really ought to complete something.

( Just in case you need an explanation: to mark by 60th birthday, instead of a big party, I decided to do some things in sixes: visit six islands, see six good films, walk to six venues/places – though my friend who is suggesting we walk from the St Bernard Pass to Rome maybe shooting a little high….)

I also have decided to learn six new things and have already done throwing a pot and am having gardening lessons, have swum a little bit underwater, managed a couple of not too bad poached eggs.

There is a very nice man who fixes wonky our chairs ready for us to re-upholster in my upholstery class and (hopefully) he is going to come and talk to us about how to identify woods.

Yes, of course, I know pine and walnut and probably mahogany but would you be able to spot an ash or elm chair at fifty paces in an auction house? Really?

Anyway, having listened to a radio programme about how good for your brain ( at whatever age you are) to learn poetry by heart, I have decided to learn six poems.

A good idea, but now faffing about wondering which ones…….

I gather the easiest to learn have strong rhythms and rhymes which makes sense.

I am not a great poetry reader – though I wish I was, but then I wish I was a piano player and did pilates for half an hour every morning before having a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and slipping into my size ten dress…..

So, I only have four poetry references in my life.

A Child’s Garden of Verses, my childhood copy still with me or so I thought. But when I went to look for it, I found I had somewhere along the line, thrown it away.

If I had remembered that, I might have rescued a copy or two that has come my way in the Oxfam shop. Now I have to buy it again.

Poems of the Sixties which I have kept since school – even then I wanted to be a poetry reader..

And, for the first time in years, I looked inside to find my younger self.

Trying to understand the way language worked and, yes playing with my handwriting style which I have to say, looks rather like my sister’s is now – now there is a Freudian something.

John Donne – I saw an programme about him when I was an impressionable teenager and have kept a soft spot. Should you want to know more https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/oct/05/john-donne-the-sun-rising

Catullus – I was delighted by how naughty he was when I arrived at university and discovered him, but then I was a sheltered girl.

Catullus’s poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one of two copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300 – he lived about 60 BC.

He wrote good stuff:

Lesbia, come, let us live and love, and be
deaf to the vile jabber of the ugly old fools,
the sun may come up each day but when our
star is out…our night, it shall last forever and
give me a thousand kisses and a hundred more
a thousand more again, and another hundred,
another thousand, and again a hundred more,
as we kiss these passionate thousands let
us lose track; in our oblivion, we will avoid
the watchful eyes of stupid, evil peasants
hungry to figure out
how many kisses we have kissed.

So, one from each of those poets gives me four poems and I am up for suggestions on the other two. 

It is the calm, if not torpor, of January in the Oxfam shop when the heady days of taking £3,000 in a week are a dim memory.

Like retailers everywhere, we in the Oxfam shop have to make the most of Christmas trading.

And, that takes quite a lot of planning and execution – and it is not like I am new to all this, I have been doing it for a number of years.

But there is one aspect which catches me out every January – what went where before?

If you are so post-Christmas you cannot bear the thought of reading about anything to do with the that ridiculously extended period of over-spending, over-eating and you are certainly over all of it, please do feel free to skip some of the following paragraphs.

From September onwards we collect donated books which are in such good a state, they could be given as a Christmas gift without anyone knowing they were from a charity shop.

(Now, that is not to say that all our customers want to shield their recipients from the source of their gift

Indeed, this year we had more customers than ever who told us their family rule was to buy everything from charity shops, and one family who arrived en masse on Christmas Eve to copy the Icelandic custom of buying each other books so they could sit and read them during the night before Christmas.)

So, we had more than 20 crates of books that were either Christmas gift books, Christmassy fiction, non fiction, children’s books, music or DVDs.

Those, along with the Oxfam new goods – baskets, rugs, chocolate, cards, decorations and so on –  take up a lot of room.

And they go – the shop ‘eats’ up all those goods in the big spend weeks – and afterwards, when they have sold (mostly) there are all sorts of gaps and empty shelves.

You would think, and you would be right to think, it should not take a genius to work out what was there before and re-instate.

But hey ho, it is never that simple.

On the Thursday after Christmas, I was in all day but unfortunately I was the only person in all day who was a crate-of-books mover.

So, I moved and moved, re-stocked, juggled, moved, re-juggled and generally did my back in.

And I have been doing that ever since, but still the shop is not quite back to normal.

It was easy to put the art section back where it had been displaced from by the need to have front-facing books.

(Front-facers are what they sound like – books on a stand showing their face not their spine, and front facers sells much more quickly than spine-facing books.

Needless to say they take up more room but they are the ones which make the shop look good.)

I know that Old and Interesting need to go back where the leftover unsold socks are, but we still have socks in place so that might have to be juggled about a bit.

Of course, being an Oxfam shop we are reliant on donations, and those can fluctuate

Before Christmas lots of people have a clear out – you might think that should be a January job and I would agree with you.

And it is not just quantity – subject matter fluctuates all the time. (Though the day we are short of biographies of famous people is the day I will eat my hat.)

So, when I decided to re-instate the shelf on how to paint or draw – usually we have lots of those books – imagine my dismay when we didn’t have any

Nor indeed could I replace them with how to knit or sew, or collect Victorian porcelain or take up calligraphy….. there weren’t any.

And of course, the table has to be kept looking good. After all the glam and razzmatazz of Christmas tables, January’s need to be calm, thoughtful and quirky without being in your face. 

And I have to say they are a bit scrabbled together because we have used up so much energy and time on the Christmas books that little brain or shop space has been given over to the aftermath

And it is pretty annoying when you have created a table display from a box or two found under a shelf and told the volunteer on the till to make sure they don’t sell anything because we have no back up, to find half of it gone 20 minutes later.

Mind you, we did a nice table of stuff I had lying about. Instead of resolutions, we went with ‘learn something new.’

I thought it was rather inspired to put out a book on cardboard modelling, another on telepathy and one on how to train your dog…..

Still, in this peace and quiet time I can look through those books which might be worth something – a 1747 small book of Sophocles in Greek, to research the tiny bookbinder’s mark to see if the otherwise boring volume is worth more than I think…..

It is the time to start planning table and window displays for the next few months, to think about finally getting rid of the socks and bringing out the old travel books and trying to value the old maps – notoriously hard.

And generally get back to the gentle running of a bookshop – until the urge or necessity to clear out bookshelves, garages, attics and parents’ homes kicks in again and dealing with a boxes and boxes of donations means all those nice pleasures get put to one side.

In the few days running up to Christmas, my best beloved and I both had our birthdays, a family wedding, an early family Christmas and, of course, there was the Oxfam shop at the busiest time of the year.

So, we decided to abandon all thoughts of quiet meals out – inevitably we would have been joined by a Christmas office party or two – and treat ourselves to a night in a nice hotel in the relative peace of January.

Helpfully, The Guardian did a feature on the best places to stay with a dog, and one was not that far way in the New Forest.

So, I booked it, and at the time the owner told me they were doing a bit of a re-furb and though it would all be done by that date, the kitchen wouldn’t be fully open.

I asked if we could get a meal, if not the fine dinning they usually went in for, and he said yes, of course.

To be fair, I had forgotten that conversation, what with Christmas, weddings, the Oxfam shop etc etc.

So, after our walk along the beach, we went to a pub and had a sandwich one the basis that you don’t want two ‘proper’ meals in a day – certainly not with chips.

When we got to the hotel, it was apparent that the re-furb wasn’t quite finished, what with carpet layers and a lot of hoovering and mopping going on  – but our room was done.

The hotel is in the middle of a commuter village so it nestles in suburbia – not quite what we had in mind, though the views at the back, as per The Guardian photo, are very nice.

• 

So, what was on offer for supper.

‘Ah yes madam,’ I was told, ‘there is a complimentary bottle of wine and a sandwich.’

Really only a sandwich option? ‘Yes.’

OK so we could have gone off and found somewhere a drive away to eat, but we decided we would opt for the wine, a conversation about work which we never usually manage at home, and a dog happy to be entertained by domestic comings and goings.

Most of the staff and carpet layers left, leaving a nice young man in sole charge and some banging and crashing in the kitchen.

After a while we asked what the sandwich options were.

I was thinking nice crusty local bread, with local ham say, or today’s crab catch or even a BLT. 

The nice young man said, ‘I’ll go and have a look what is left in the fridge’

Really? ‘Yes.’

He came back and said he had found some cheese and smoked salmon and I probed for a few more details but he looked panicked

In the end I said, ‘Would you like me to make up the sandwiches?’

He looked relieved so I told him to get out what he had in the way of bread and potential sandwich fillers, and lead me to them.

Well, I refused the Bernard Matthews slices of chicken breast….

The bread was sliced and frozen so had to be de-frosted and it certainly wasn’t anybody’s finest.

The cheese was a half packet of Cathedral cheddar and the pickle came in a lidded bucket, so not all that local or homemade.

The butter was also pretty cold so spreading it was a challenge and the smoked salmon looked like it was a new year’s leftover.

I did what I could and asked if he had any greenery and he came back with a bag of spinach leaves and another bucketful of (actually rather nice) green olives.

I tried to make it look like a nice platter and he was very impressed. ‘So much better than I would have been able to do,’ he said – and I think he was probably right.

• 

(We thought nostalgically of the very, very good BLT a hotel in a mid-priced chain had managed to rustle up when we unexpectedly arrived at a Reading hotel late one evening. But that is another story and one I think I might have already told you.)

To be fair, we did get a cooked breakfast the next day but at least one of us, hoping for a bacon sandwich, was just a bit disappointed.

• 

I have to say that my TripAdvisor review for the Manor at Sway won’t be that great.