6 Oct: invent your perfect ice cream flavour

Decisions, decisions. Is it one flavour, or a multiple that taste particularly good together? Does it need to be like something familiar or can it be un-ice cream like (ie something you wouldn’t normally associate with cold and creamy tastes)?

Part of me is tempted to say that the perfect ice cream has already been invented – if you go by combination. I had it at the end of a long canoe ride on a quiet German river, with my German penfriend of the time.

Hot day, spot of paddling, and then the reward at the agreed stopping place: ice cream. Three scoops: one lemon, one cinnamon, one marzipan. Bliss.

Now I know that people can be divided as to the merits of marzipan, but we know that nutty flavours and ice cream go together, yes? Lemon, familar, yet a good contrast to the richness of the cream, with sharp acidity. Great when you’ve been paddling for most of the day – on water, yet not much with you to drink.

But the clincher was the cinnamon.  A bit of heat and warmth to contrast with the chill of the ice cream. I guess these days people would do this with chilli – ice cream flavours have come on a bit in the last couple of decades.

Put all three together, and you have an ice cream experience that I think I am still yet to top. Perhaps because it stands in my memory as the first really good ice cream that I’d eaten – perhaps because it was the perfect thing to eat after a day on the water.

There is one challenger to the memory: a melon ice cream that I had in Florence one time. We’d done our homework, you see, and found out about a particular gelateria which was famous for its ice creams. (Memory now escapes me, but it was close to a reasonably famous church with its own piazza in front.)

I like trying new things when I get the opportunity – and how often do you get to try melon ice cream? Unless you walked round the block and came back to the same place, pretty much never, I’d say.

It was astonishing ice cream – astonishing because melon is such a delicate flavour, and yet they had really captured it. You had a mouthful, and it was clearly melon. And it was refreshing, and creamy, and any other adjective you care to attach to really good Italian ice cream.

I was a fan of strawberry ice cream at a much younger age. A good homemade strawberry ice cream is also high up in the pantheon of ice cream flavours. And I rather fancy a proper homemade raspberry ripple some time, where you make the ice cream and run the raspberry flavour through it.

However, after much deliberation, I think I have come up with something. If it’s possible to get a creme de cassis flavour ice cream, I’d be there in a shot. Blackcurrant does that to you.

You could possibly call it Ribena ice cream – but I’m voting for creme de cassis.
Grownups need their ice cream treats too.

L is for log

Had my parents round today. At one point, Junior Reader took Granny Ro off to the post office to post some letters and came back…with a log.

Now I’ve already posted about the many and various items that kids pick up and bring home. But I wasn’t particularly expecting a log. On the way back from the post office.
Yes, there are trees on either side of the road, but…it’s not an overly outdoorsy road, if you know what I mean.

There is a family history to log collection. It comes from the days when we would have a fire at home, and Mum would be able to exercise her skills in constructing fires. They would often involve coal, but you never passed up a good bit of wood when you saw it.

Junior Reader, inducted into the arcana of the family on both sides, has understood the importance of claiming your Useful Bit of Log, when one has been spotted, and has clearly done so today.

Mum and Dad, after some time without a proper fire to play with, recently got themselves a wood burning stove. So there’s much thinking about wood, and the prospect of fires to warm them through the winter.

They did also get a log delivery recently. But that doesn’t limit the log collecting, you see. It just means you don’t have to panic at the notion of collecting ALL your logs for the winter.

In the past, log collecting tied in nicely with dog walking. Fire needed wood, dog needed walked – and both things could be accomplished together, if you planned where to go for your walk.

I feel I should say at this point that log collecting is not about nicking wood from other people, hacking down trees, or anything like that. It’s spotting smaller branches that have come down and are already on the ground. And it’s typically done around public footpath areas where you can reasonably pick up a log and bring it home.

You should also be aware that there is a specialist term for this activity. It’s chumping. I have no idea where the term originated, and whether it is a publicly acknowledged word or just a family one that was made up for the occasion. (I suspect the latter.)

There is the longer phrase, chumping for firewood. I have to say, it’s a bit unnecessary, since the whole point of chumping is for firewood, but there you are. I aim to please when considering additions to your vocabulary.

The additional fun of chumping, of course, is the individual item of wood you bring back. It’s one thing to have some nicely split logs delivered, but finding your own piece is even nicer. The contours, the placement of twigs and branches, all add to the beauty of the log.

Unlike some of the other found items that might accumulate, a log has its hour on the fire, and then is gone. Collecting and usefulness combined.

5 October: the perfect dinner party

I am on the phone to the imaginary agent of Stephen Fry. The agent is sorry, but the imaginary Stephen is booked solid for several months. As a popular person to invite to imaginary perfect dinner parties, I need to understand it is hard for him to make time to come.

I try the imaginary Emily Dickinson, but she is staying at home and washing her hair. I think that’s what she said. She spoke in verse, too, just like I imagined she might. But trying to get a noted recluse to come to your imaginary dinner party turns out to be difficult too.

I consider a few other options. The imaginary Marco Polo is involved in a press junket, promoting his book AND his new line in pasta. It may take a while to catch on, I think, but the press lap it up – as will the public in the future.

The imaginary JK Rowling might just come. I think I sold it to her on the basis of our children’s book collection. And I promised not to talk HP. Plus it’s Edinburgh – she’ll only need a taxi home at the end of the night.

The thing with imaginary dinner parties is that I’m finding it hard to get behind them. It’s not to say I wouldn’t like to meet any of these people – and countless more. I’m sure I could encourage Sylvia Plath to whip up some muffins for afters, and see if Debussy would mind picking some background music for while we’re eating.

But the perfect dinner parties are really about the people that we love to be with, that we’re not with enough. The perfect dinner parties are the ones in our memories, as well as in our imaginations.

And it turns out, it’s not even about a dinner party. It’s probably about a pot luck, or a meal we’ve prepared together. It’s one where we’ve chopped ingredients side by side, over chats and jokes, and foregone the best china but made sure there is plenty to eat.

The perfect dinner parties are ones where the dirty plates are not only forgotten about, but go off and clean themselves, and put the kettle on for coffee. (I think I might need to be in Beauty and the Beast for that one.)

They are all about being relaxed, not having to hurry. Ideally, no one has to go home, and we stay up late, put the world to rights, and accept a second glass of something.

The perfect dinner party includes children that go to sleep on time, and that lie in the next morning so that you don’t have to worry about having stayed up so late.

And it includes its own interludes: the ones where you pick a book off a shelf and get drawn in; the ones where you go off into twos and threes for in-depth conversations, and come back together again when everyone needs a little extra something to nibble.

I imagine that even Emily Dickinson might cope with some of that.

 

C is for clay

There are found items – and then there are ones you find again. Which feel pretty much as good, as it turns out.

There is an obvious mismatch between what kids want weekends to be about, and what parents want weekends to be about. Parents’ thoughts tend to drift towards savoured cups of coffee, reading, quiet – and preferably getting up later than on a week day.

Kids’ thoughts around the weekend tend to ignore the getting up at the same time bit, but it’s fair to say that lots of time to play and have fun would be high up the list of what to do at the weekend.

Time to try out the cunning plan devised a couple of nights ago. I put together some items in a basket, put them upstairs, and left a note on the table for Junior Player to spot at breakfast time.

Clay might not sound like one of the things that brings on parental calm, but Junior Player had been doing some clay activities with Granny Jen over the summer, and there was a nicely worked lump of play left.

There was a little ‘oh!’ and then a ‘can I…?’ Because the right kind of found item is just as inviting the second time round.

Junior Player picked up again at the same spot as before, and completed the model as planned. It didn’t seem to matter that there had been a couple of months in between times.

The thing is, the week is full enough. Full of activities – full too of new found items to bring home. And often in all this fullness, the things we already have, that are good, get forgotten about.

The basket is the start of an attempt to do something about that. To get past the maternal ‘why don’t you play with what you have?’ and make it easy to say yes to things that you actually want your child to have a chance to do.

So now the clay eyeball monster is complete, and also has its own bed. We might even get it painted.

But I think I will forgo the lie-in for that one.

4 Oct: I need…

I need…to take a deep breath. Because the minute I say I need, it feels like there is a rush of stuff that clamours for my attention.

The things the world says I need. (Some of which I might quite fancy at points.) But it feels like it’s things, things and more things.

I sit in the sitting room in the quiet, and look around at the debris of the week, still waiting to be cleared up, and think: is it just about more things? Because there seems to be plenty to sort out here already.

—

I take another breath. I need this quiet, this space to write. I need the end of the week, and the prospect of rest (or something approaching that). I need to tune in to what my thoughts may be telling me, because I discover that there is a path to the tapping of the keys, if only I can listen for it.

Breath. I need the slowing, the lack of chatter, even from my nearest and dearest. I need my thoughts to proceed from one thing to another to another, to find meaning in the progression, answers even, maybe.

I need to practise. I need to keep the words coming, because writer after writer after writer whose words I’ve read this year has said: the only way to get better at writing is to write.

I need good words. I do. It’s why I often read instead of getting going on my own words. I need the inward sigh of the right turn of phrase, the spark of contact when seeing someone express how I feel too.

I need thinking space. I could meditate, I could go for long walks, I could do other deep and pondering activities. But writing will do just fine as thinking space too.

I need perspective. Writing – and reading – these things give me that. The chance to take a step back, to allow the flurry of the day to settle into position. I need the opportunity to put down my pack and look around, and check the road I’m is the one I think I want to be on.

I need to realign. To come back to who I think I might be, at my core. Who I’d like to be, even. Writing does that for me. It helps me remember who I am and how I came to be here, and why certain things matter, and others don’t.

I need to agree that these are my needs – and that they are OK. They may not seem as pressing as making things fit in the freezer, or signing the school permission slip, or finding a new container to control the tidal wave of Lego.

I need to not be afraid of needing things too. And many of those needs are for the free things, the ones we so often sail past as we fill our days with the more concrete needs of our homes and our families.

I need time. I need quiet. I need thinking space. I need perspective. I need to realign. And I don’t need to spend money to do so.

But every now and then, I might also need some chocolate. Just to help with the perspective, you understand.