A reblog from William Savage, whose blog I discovered recently.
This post is quite fascinating. I’ve never eaten purslane, just pulled it out of my garden as a weed; it’s supposed to be quite good. Pickled asparagus, however, you can even buy in the grocery store here. Storing lettuce in sand for winter – never heard of that, but again, sometimes you can get “gourmet” lettuces here – little butterhead ones – with the roots still attached, which I guess is the same principle.
As for the word “walm” (check the footnote), I bet that that’s where we get “overwhelmed” from!
I want a copy of that “Compleat Housewife” book he talks about. Wonder where you could get it.
Category: this and that
Happy Christmas!
Dashing Through the Snow
I had some errands to do in the big city. Well, one errand really – getting my German passport renewed, which requires going to the German Consulate in Vancouver – but of course, it’s also the perfect opportunity for a Christmas visit with family & friends.
But this is winter. In Canada. Vancouver, from where I live, is on the other side of a mountain range – nothing on the order of the Rockies, but still, mountains; the highest pass is at 1728 m. And while I quite enjoy that drive in the summer in nice clear weather over dry roads (there’s nothing better than a solitary five-hour drive for concocting novelling plots), I utterly refuse to drive it myself between Thanksgiving and Easter. Because, mountains. In other words, snow.
And boy, was I ever justified in that policy this time. I’d booked my Greyhound bus ticket a couple of weeks ago, when there wasn’t a speck of white to be seen around my house. Then, a few days ago, it started snowing. And it snowed, and snowed…
So there I was at the bus depot, first thing in the morning as it was just getting light. Greyhound stations are depressing places. In this one, the women’s washroom has one stall with a broken lock, the next one with a broken toilet tank (it won’t fill properly), and a hand dryer that just sighs at you instead of blowing properly, but does so with great regularity about every ten seconds even when you’re not holding your dripping hands under it. So there you are, sitting on the can – “Whoooooh!” – pause – “Whoooooh!” – pause – “Whoooooh!”…
The bus was over an hour late leaving. The driver had got in late the previous night from driving the Vancouver route, and he needed his eight-hour break to get some sleep before he could get behind the wheel again – that’s the law. A law which I’m in utter agreement with, especially in this case. Buddy, I want you to get a good solid kip, before you’re carting me and fifty others across that mountain!
“I drove this road last night,” the driver said as we were pulling out of town, “and there’s nothing good about it. I’m going to take it slow.” You do that, buddy, you do that! “However,” he continued, “you’ll still see me passing a lot of the other vehicles, and that’s simply because this is the best-equipped vehicle on the road.” Very reassuring, that (even if he just said it to keep us calm and not-freaked-out).
So on we went, through a winter wonderland. Snow, snow and more snow – what you could see; most of the higher-up view was hidden in a thick cloud. Rows of fence posts with their comical little white toques; waterfalls of icicles streaming off rock walls; trees shrouded in drifts of cotton wool. Coming back down the mountain, not-yet-frozen streams still gurgling beside the road, the rocks in their stream bed converted to puffy feather duvets floating amidst the dark water.
I was profoundly grateful for that bus driver, who ferried us so safely and competently across. In the end, we were only an hour and a half late – his “taking it slow” made for no more than an extra fifteen minutes. An everyday hero, I was thinking. It might sound a bit melodramatic, but still. The lives of fifty people were in his hands that morning, on that snowy mountain road. And then, no doubt, he turned right around and drove another fifty back the other way. I sure hope he got a longer break that time.
Life, the Universe, and a Snowy Drive Over the Mountains. Things to be grateful for.
Marbleous Monday: Source of Greatness
THE SOURCE OF GREATNESS
For one fleeting moment
This icy cold morning
The marble casts a shadow
Much longer than itself
Blue fire sparks in its depths
A comet
Blazing a trail
Across the orange peel of kitchen counter
Then the winter sunrise
Is swallowed up by clouds
And once again
There is but
A small ball of glass.
5.12.2016
This, That, and NaNoWriMo’s Over
I was going to write an erudite and contemplative post for you today. It was going to be all about why I do NaNoWriMo, even though every year I just about lose my marbles with the stress of trying to finish. Or maybe about some more editorial pontifications on Point of View and Tense (first or third? past or present?). Or about the wonders of community (which actually ties right in with point #1).
But I tried to write, and it just wasn’t coming out right – I was sounding way too preachy, or, conversely, too trite, even to my own ears. I think I might have used up most of my words on my story over the last 32 days.
So I thought, forget this nonsense; I’ll just show you a few pictures. You know, worth a thousand words, blah blah.
Life, the Universe, and Five Thousand Words Worth of Pictures. Happy December!
Wordless Wednesday: A Wreck with a View
News from the Writing Trenches, or: The Wonders of Google Maps
In case I hadn’t mentioned, it’s NaNoWriMo, which means I’m in the throes of novelling – and novelling, for me, always involves copious researching.
The current story (not a Septimus series book, a standalone) is partially set in Munich, so I’ve got Google Maps permanently open to a map of the city. But not just a map – Google Street View is amazing. I’m constantly hopping back and forth between map view and panning around the streets of the city.
I’m also going back to my photos from last year’s trip, and among my pictures was one I took of a painting in the Neue Pinakothek: A view of the Residenzstrasse in Munich looking towards the Max-Joseph-Platz, painted in 1826 by Domenico Quaglio. Now check it out side by side with a screen shot of Google Street View of the same spot:
Is that cool, or what? I love how the basic line of the street really hasn’t changed much.
Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you. And if you spend the next three hours armchair sightseeing in Munich, don’t blame me. (Actually, yeah, I’ll gladly take the blame. Check out Nymphenburg Palace, for example, on Street View. It’s fabulous.)
Life, the Universe, and Google Street View. The more things change…
The Princess and the Glass Piano
There once was a princess of Bavaria… No, this isn’t the beginning of a limerick. For one, I’m not much good at rhymes. And for another, this line has too many syllables in it. So, no limerick. Just a little story that I stumbled across in my current research rabbit trails: the story of the Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria.
I was looking up the Gallery of Beauties, a collection of 36 paintings in Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, which I got to see last year on my trip to Germany (pardon the blurry photo). King Ludwig I of Bavaria was a notable connoisseur of feminine beauty, and so between the years of 1827 and 1850 whenever he met with a particularly beautiful young woman, he commissioned a portrait of her to be hung in his gallery. Yes, some of those ladies he had affairs with, but most of them are just beautiful girls he liked to look at. They came from all walks of life – one of the most famous one is “die schöne Münchnerin” (the beautiful Munich girl), Helene Sedlmayer, who was a shoemaker’s daughter and servant girl delivering toys to the royal palace.
But the one whose story caught my interest was about as far from a peasant as you can get – she was, in fact, Ludwig’s own daughter. Alexandra Amalie, born in 1826, really was beautiful (notwithstanding the weird early-Victorian droopy spaniel-ear curls she wore. Can’t blame her for the fashion aberrations of her time). And gifted, to boot – she has several published books to her credit.
But she was also a bit, um, disturbed. By the sounds of it, she was a germaphobe at a time when germs hadn’t even been discovered (the accounts describe it as “an obsession with cleanliness”). And then one day, when she was around 23, she was found to be sidling awkwardly down one of the corridors of the palace. Apparently she was of the firm conviction that when she was a child, she had swallowed a glass grand piano, which was still inside of her – so if she walked normally, straight on instead of sideways, she might get stuck in doorways. Or the piano would shatter, or something.
Yup. That’s some delusion alright. Then, so the story goes, one day when she was throwing up, some quick-witted servants chucked a little model piano in the bucket of barf, and told her that she had now vomited up the instrument and was rid of it. Unfortunately, the account I read didn’t say if it cured her of her grand delusion. But I do hope it did – it must be awfully uncomfortable to be living with a glass piano in your belly.
Incidentally, Alexandra Amalie was the aunt of Ludwig II, the Bavarian king who squandered massive amounts of state funds to live out his fantasies, building several “fairy tale castles” (including Neuschwanstein) so he could pretend to be a medieval monarch or be dining with the French Sun King Louis XIV (who’d been dead for almost two centuries by then). Apparently he came by his, uh, imagination honestly.
And those are the kinds of things you can learn about when you’re hopping down the research rabbit trails.
Life, the Universe, a Princess and a Grand Glass Piano. Aren’t you glad you know about her now?
PS: Most of this story I got from unverified Internet sources, chiefly Wikipedia and a couple of other sites. So it’s pretty much hearsay; don’t take it as quotable material – if you’re trying to do real research on the royal house of Bavaria, keep digging.
PPS: The English writer Deborah Levy wrote a radio play about Alexandra Amalie, The Glass Piano, which was produced by the BBC in 2011. Quite interesting – you can listen to it here.
The Fairy in the Pansy Flower
Meanwhile, back in the land of imagination…
Did you know there’s a fairy in every pansy flower? The wild pansies, not the big cultivated ones you buy at the garden centre. I didn’t know about this until just the other day, when one of the other members of my Writer’s Circle read us a story of how she was a little girl, and her grandmother told her that there were fairies in the flower garden. She showed one to her, picking the petals off a pansy flower and laying them in the little girl’s hand, until the girl could see the fairy’s tiny face, her beautiful yellow and purple skirt, and her big green petal bonnet.
I had never heard about that, so I had to go home and check – I have quite a few wild pansies in my garden (which in this case aren’t wild, but carefully grown from seed). And it’s true! See?
Isn’t she pretty? I’m not sure what her name is, but I think she and her sisters have been looking after my garden quite admirably. I’m pretty sure they’ve also been having conversations with the ladybugs that like to sit on the leaves of the marigolds. It would account for the whispering I sometimes hear when I’m up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and step out on the balcony to look up at the stars.
Oh, and then I found out another neat thing I didn’t know. I was just looking up the flower, which is actually properly called viola (‘pansy’ is generally the term for the cultivar). The Viola tricolor has a whole raft of names, according to Wikipedia – Johnny Jump-up (that’s the name on the seed packet I grew mine from), heartsease, heart’s delight, tickle-my-fancy, Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me, come-and-cuddle-me, three faces in a hood, and – drumroll! – love-in-idleness. That’s the one I hadn’t known (or if I did, I’d forgotten).
And it’s cool, because, of course, love-in-idleness is the flower in Midsummer Night’s Dream that Oberon and Puck use to enchant Titania, Lysander and Demetrius, making them fall in love with whomever or whatever they first set eyes on when they wake up:
OBERON: That very time I saw …
Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took …
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, …
Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.PUCK: I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, 1
I hadn’t realised that Shakespeare is talking about the humble viola here. Which makes sense, that the flower that has a fairy in each of its blossoms would be ready to do the Fairy King’s bidding, doesn’t it? (The last few lines of that passage also tells you the top swimming speed of a leviathan: less than 1 league in 40 minutes – a league being 5.556km, that comes to 8.33 km/h, or 5.18 mph, which translates to 4.5 knots. Good to know, just in case I ever need to outrun a leviathan when I’m out sailing. Who says Shakespeare hasn’t his practical uses?)
So, apart from the fact that a viola is really pretty (as well as edible), it also has some significant mythical qualities. Between all the fairies in the pansy flowers, and the dragonsbane (tarragon) plant in the herb bed, my garden should be well protected against mythical intruders. At least the undesirable ones. I’m not sure how I’d feel about Puck, or Oberon himself, making an appearance – but we’ll have to see, won’t we.
(There’s also a frog in one of the flowerbeds – he croaks quite loudly sometimes – but so far I’ve been unable to spot him, never mind kiss him or chuck him against the wall. Besides, even though I am the youngest daughter in my family, I’m married already, prince or no prince. So it hardly matters. But if you’re in search of a prince, come on over – you can have a chat with all those pansy fairies, they might point you in the right direction.)
Life, the Universe, and the Fairies in the Pansy Flowers. I’m so glad I found out about them.
This and That
We just spent a few days away, south of the border (they call washrooms restrooms there, and Mars bars are Milky Ways), which meant I didn’t have time to read all the blog posts that dropped into my inbox for the last few days. Which, in turn, made me realise just how prolific my bloggy friends are and how un-prolific I’ve been on the blogging front myself this summer.
But then again, that seems par for the course for me in summer. It gets hot and I get miserable, plus there’s all the canning and other food processing to do, plus there’s company, and trips away, and…
But I’ll spare you further excuses. And just so you can’t say that I never say nothin’, here’s a post for you today. With a picture, no less – highly symbolic, I’m sure: a guy painting a house a brand-new colour, right in the middle of Vancouver. New beginnings. From dated sky-blue to a tidy neutral white. Plus, the painter looks so decorative standing there on his ladder, like somebody put him there just for the sake of the composition. So that counts as significant and meaningful by way of a blog post, no?
Life, the Universe, and New Paint on an Old Building. Happy September, what’s left of it!