The place-names will tell you straightaway that you’re not in Indiana anymore.  We began in Harefield St Mary’s, Middlesex, with the winter sun low on the horizon.

We gathered in the churchyard, exchanged hushed greetings, some ringers sipping coffee or tea from thermoses they had brought against the chill of the morning.

The church itself was very cold, with that particular chill an empty, ancient stone building can contain.  But it was filled with flowers from a recent funeral, and their fragrance filled the air and lit up the extravagant altar with color, providing a lively contrast with the carved, marble Eizabethan death monuments.

It was a beautiful place to ring, with six light and easy bells, befitting the first ring of the day.  The ringers came from all over: our own dear St Mary’s Barnes, and Chiswick, and several ringers from Richmond and Fulham and one or two from the host church.  We ran the gamut of skill: me at the bottom really, then our three teenage girls who formed a giggling gaggle all day, then the serious ringers who have been at it for many, many years.

I’ll explain a tiny bit about what we do.  First we ring what are called “rounds,” in order from the highest sound (the lightest bell) down the numbers to the lowest sound (the heaviest bell), “la-la-la-la-la-la.”  It’s surprisingly difficult to do, to be every single time fourth — for example — in order, every SINGLE time.  A fraction of  a second early and you CLANG onto the sound of the bell before you.  A fraction of a second late and the bell after you CLANGS onto your sound.  Every single time you pull the bell you have a fresh chance to get it right, which makes it a very satisfying, instant result.  No delayed gratification necessary!  But every mistake is intensely public and pointed to YOU.

Then once we’ve establish good consistent rounds, someone (the person called the conductor) begins to “call changes.”  That is, he or she shouts, “Four to five,” and you on the fourth bell switch places with the fifth.  The fifth follows the third and you take fifth’s place.  The you have to pay close attention to what the conductor tells you to do next, but ALSO what he tells the fifth to do, since you’re following him!  I find it incredibly challenging, but everyone tells me that eventually, following the directions becomes easy.  The rules of change-ringing (as it’s called, when you begin to change places) means no bell can move more than one spot at a time.  Also, the bells must be conducted back into “rounds” before we can be told to “stand,” which means to stop ringing.  I cannot imagine being the conductor and keeping it all in my head!

The more advanced ringers ring what are called “Methods”, where the “changes” have been made into patterns and memorized, with names like “Cambridge Surprise Minor” or “Kent Treble Bob Major.”  I truly cannot imagine ever managing to memorize a method.  But it could happen.  Never say die!

We moved through the graveyard, solemnly paying homage to the beautiful and touching ash memorials in the ancient wall.

From Harefield we travelled to the most beautiful church I have ever seen, called Chalfont St Giles.

This church is located in the area called, as you might imagine, “The Chalfonts.”  These little villages, with “The Ruislips” and “The Slaughters” and “The Rissingtons” make up what one of my favorite mystery authors calls “guests at a dinner party.”  As in, “I’ve invited the Chalfonts, but they can’t come, so I’ll ask the Ruislips instead.”

Chalfont St Giles was warm and cozy, overlooked by Cromwell and therefore still decorated with 14th-century religious paintings.

We rang St Giles’s eight bells, marvelling at how different they all felt from Harefield.

I wandered around the ringing chamber reading what are called “peal boards,” which list the conductor and ringers who have gathered in the past to ring a successful “method,” which usually takes about three hours.  Our host pointed out to me Mr J.D. Shanklin.  “This chap found time between ringing peals to discover the hole in the ozone layer.”

After our ring, the more hardy among us climbed the extremely steep and ancient belltower stairs to see the original timber fittings holding up the bells.  Six hundred years old.

Even more touching, more personal, and more stunning to me than the timber itself, was this object, the original ladder leading to the bells.  Looking at this ladder brings vividly to my mind the thousands of feet that climbed them from time immemorial, taking an hour or two out of their busy medieval, Renaissance, Elizabethan, Victorian, 21st century lives to care for the bells of St Giles.

From St Giles we went to Chalfont St Peter, a heavier ring of eight bells the heaviest of which weighed about 1000 pounds.  Here the peal boards seemed to me the ultimate in Englishness.  The names!  Newton, Thackeray, Whittington.  And a tribute to Mr E George Swift, who rang until he was 92 and then asked that a peal be rung on his birthday every year until he would have turned 100.

From St Peter we drove to the gorgeous, impossibly magical village of Denham in Buckinghamshire, home to many television dramas.  You can see why.

How beautiful that house must be in the spring, when the vines are heavy with flowers.  And this house!  Can you imagine living in such a picture-perfect place?  It would make you behave differently, breaking into atrocious blank verse at the drop of a hat, wearing ruffs around your neck.

We had a lovely lunch in the Green Man pub — fillet of sea bream with a rich root vegetable dauphinoise and pickled fennel, delicious — and then walked through the village to St Mary’s, to ring their lovely HEAVY eight bells — the tenor (the heaviest and therefore lowest note) weighing just over a TON.  I can assure I didn’t ring it!  But I did ring the number 6 which weighed a half ton.

From there we headed to the only ten-bell church on our agenda, at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire.

The sound of 10 bells being rung in rounds, once we got it perfectly timed, was simply majestic.  Here is a recording (don’t click the link if you’re sitting next to a sleeping baby or mate!) of 10 bells, ringing partly in rounds and partly in a method.  I think it could be a love-hate thing.  Some neighbors living near to churches with bells think they’re in heaven, others get simply gaga at the sound every week.

We finished our day at Pinner, just outside London, in a lovely little crowded 8-bell chamber overlooking the nave of the church.  The organist down below practiced doggedly throughout our ringing!  The wheel that holds all the ropes — these with beautiful blue “Sallies” — is called a “spider” and is wafted into the air, high above the chamber, when the bells are at rest.

By this time we were all tired, cold and getting a bit cranky, with the conductors getting slightly scratchy at bad rounds or imprecise call changes.  It was time to go home, at least for the teenagers and me, and our teachers.

We emerged in the cold twilight feeling a tremendous sense of achievement, rubbing our sore and blistered hands together, chattering about our favorite churches, the idiosyncracies of the bells, our goals and hopes and failures and embarrassments of the day.  We turned around in the village street to see Pinner St John the Baptist rising on the hillside in the dark.

What a completely mad, bonkers, insane way to spend a day!  Thank goodness for a good dinner at home: John had piled tons of extra toppings — peppers, mushrooms, grilled halloumi cheese, Parma ham — onto readymade pizzas and had steamed artichokes.  Heaven!

So that was my ringing adventure, our “Winter Outing.”  I will miss the “Summer Outing” when we’re at Red Gate Farm, but I’ll be in charge of organizing it because.… drum roll… I’ve been chosen as the new Tower Secretary for St Mary’s Barnes!  I am very excited.  Lots of admin, lots of email, and lots of ringing.

And of course Sunday morning found me up bright and early stretching tired muscles to ring for services at Barnes and Chiswick, feeling a bit martyred but quite proud.  I cannot remember the last time in my life that I set a very difficult task, persevered and actually achieved my goal.  It’s a rare enough feeling once we’re past school-age, and one to be savored, whatever the cost.

My reward for all this work was to invent something Avery had for lunch at school, and came home simply raving about.  “Have you ever had Paris Butter, Mummy?  It’s HEAVENLY!”  It was but the work of a moment to google it and find many divergent recipes.  The one that worked for us, melted onto grilled fillet steaks, was this:

Paris Butter

(makes a large banana-sized roll, keeps for up to 3 months in foil in the freezer)

250g/1 cup butter

1 tbsp each: garlic, shallots, cornichons, capers, fresh tarragon, fresh thyme, fresh dill, fresh chives, freshrosemary, tomato paste, lemon zest, pine nuts, anchovy, brandy, madeira

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 pinch each: curry powder, cayenne pepper, paprika

juice of 1/2 lemon

Simply throw everything into a food processor or blender and mix until completely smooth.  Roll in foil in a cylinder shape and freeze.  Cut off one coin-shaped piece for each steak.

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Duty calls now.  Avery is home ill and listless with a cold, so chicken soup is in order.  Then I’ll sit back, watch my blisters healing, and enjoy the memories of a magical day out in my adopted land.  What an adventure it was.

This is indeed a rare sight in my life: sunrise!  As you know, I am no morning person.  Quite the opposite; I am at my very best late at night when all the experiences of the day have filtered into my mind in all their variety.  I tend to avoid early-morning activities whenever possible, as everything seems quite impossible to me at 7 a.m.

However, volunteering at Avery’s school waits for no woman, and this week saw me at an early meeting of the Tutor Group Representatives at a school mum’s house in Chelsea.  So up I got, and my reward was this lovely London sky.

There has been so much volunteering lately!  I always feel that since I don’t work full-time should donate all the time I can to school and elsewhere whenever I can, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve got in over my head.  We Tutor Reps discussed having various social events for the class parents, and I had to stop myself offering up our house for drinks for 80.  What if it rained and we couldn’t use the garden and were all stuck in the kitchen, as cozy as it is?

On Friday I shall host my termly luncheon of the Lost Property volunteers, which does mean stuffing 30 ladies into the kitchen-dining room.  I do love the luncheon, and have been spending a lot of time in the middle of the night trying to decide what two main dishes to cook.  A whole side of salmon, roasted in honey and soy sauce?  A crab and goats cheese tart with scallions and fresh thyme?  My current obsession: chicken meatballs in a creamy paprika sauce?  Or the perennial favorite of Lillian Hellman chicken, breast fillets baked in cheese and breadcrumbs with fresh thyme?

Lillian Hellman Chicken

(serves 6)

6 boneless chicken breast fillets, well-trimmed

1 1/2 cups each mayonnaise and Pecorino or Parmesan cheese, grated

juice of 1/2 lemon

2 stalks fresh thyme, leaves only

1 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs

1 tsp Fox Point Seasoning

handful rocket/arugula leaves

In a wide, shallow bowl or deep plate, mix the mayonnaise and cheese and lemon juice and thyme.  In another shallow bowl or plate, mix the breadcrumbs and Fox Point Seasoning.  Have a foil-lined cookie sheet ready.

Smear the chicken pieces each with the mayonnaise mixtures, then dredge in breadcrumbs on all surfaces.  Bake at 425F/220C for 30 minutes.  Serve sliced on the bias in thick slices and garnish with rocket leaves.

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This recipe is a tremendous winner with men, women and children, and probably will win hands down for Friday because it is fool-proof, popular and easy.  We will all gather around two long tables and discuss the various ideas we have for getting the girls to “find” more of their Property.  I always feel there is something rather heroic about all of us with our various advanced degrees, reaching into dirty rubbish bags to bring out mud-encrusted lacrosse boots stuffed with mouthguards, hoping to find matching pairs.

Before that lovely event, though, tomorrow is my first training day for a new volunteering project, Home-Start.  This effort is funded by the government and sends volunteers into “at-risk” households with small children, trying to catch traumatised, depressed or just needy mothers and offer them help and support, before the situation gets so desperate that the Social Services are called in.  I am a bit intimidated by the idea of trying to help these families, but I reassure myself that many hours of training will take place before I end up on somebody’s sofa holding a crying baby.

And today I took on a new challenge: finding vendors for the Christmas Fair at my beloved church, home of my bell-ringing efforts.

I had such fun selling Christmas cards, setting up the Christmas tree, and tearing down and cleaning up after the fair that I’ve been tapped for a bit more responsibility this coming year.  Isn’t it hard to believe anyone is even THINKING about Christmas yet?  But we are.  So if you find yourself with a company selling teenager-friendly bracelets, or cashmere throws, handmade baby clothes or organic soaps, let me know!  How I’m going to fit this new job into also helping John who is heading up Avery’s school’s Christmas Fair remains to be seen.

To be honest, though, I’ve spent an embarrassing portion of the last week simply trying to get back into London time.  The older I get, the harder I find it to come back East, especially after several weeks getting used to living five hours earlier.  There have been a fair number of naps, and then the resulting fair number of sleepless middle-of-the-nights.  I find myself coming down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, feeling slightly confused as to whether I’ll see the roaring woodstove fire of Red Gate Farm, or feeling the warm hum of the Aga of London.

Over the weekend we kept ourselves awake by another visit to Columbia Road, East End site of our holly-wreath shopping trip before Christmas.  Avery is terribly keen to live there, right now, however unaffordable and inconvenient it may be to our West London lives.  But I can see her point.  Armed with her new camera, she captured the sights and sounds.

Isn’t it hard to believe that this street view simply happened, without planning?  And then there was this beauty.

The graffiti is completely clever.  Check out this little montage of paper figures glued to the wall, their shadows painted in ink on the pavement.

There are many mysterious messages to be absorbed.

One wonders what is expressed here, besides a lovely visual image.

Finally, in need of sustenance, we ambled into Campania Gastronomia, a gorgeous Italian outpost of total deliciousness.  I had lovely hefty meatballs in a garlicky tomato sauce, John had a pumpkin and belly pork risotto, and Avery opted for a deceptively simple panno of the freshest mozzarella, Parma ham, perfect artisan bread and fruity olive oil.

What a lovely little restaurant.  Next time I want the meat-and-cheese platter which included any number of cured pork, beef and salami, and Gorgonzola, Pecorino, buffalo mozzarella, ahhh…

We had one evening over the weekend to feed ourselves whilst Avery was out on the town, so I invented a dish containing practically every ingredient she doesn’t like.  But you will.

Roasted Salmon on Cannellini Bean Mash with Gorgonzola and Parsley

(serves 4)

1 lb fresh salmon fillets

1 tbsp olive oil

sprinkle Fox Point Seasoning

1/4 cup olive oil

2 soup-size cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

6 cloves garlic, minced

LOTS of fresh black pepper

sprinkle red chilli flakes

large bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped roughly (leaves only)

1 tbsp light cream

 Gorgonzola or other mild blue cheese, amount to your taste

1 tbsp tiny English cress

Place salmon fillets on a foil-lined dish and drizzle with olive oil, then sprinkle with Fox Point.  Place in a hot oven, 425F/220C and roast for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the rest of the olive oil in a large frying pan.  Add beans, garlic, black pepper, and red chilli flakes.  Cook over medium heat until garlic is softened.  Add parsley and cook for another minute, stirring occasionally.  When salmon is ready to serve, stir cream into the beans and then sprinkle over as much Gorgonzola as you like.  Place a serving of mash on each dinner plate and top with salmon fillet.  Sprinkle with cress and serve hot or warm.

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This bean dish is a REVELATION of complex flavors.  The salmon is almost superfluous, although the combinations are lovely.  But a vegetarian could make a meal of the beans.  Intensely savoury, redolent of garlic, soft and comforting yet full of robust flavors, this dish is a real find.

I must love you and leave you.  Avery’s breakfast tomorrow will be lemon-blueberry cake and right now, there are lemons.  And blueberries.  Must get them together.  In the meantime, let me dedicate this blog post to a loyal and enthusiastic reader, my husband’s longtime family friend Anna, who died two days ago.  She and our family shared a love of rescue animals.  Why not take a look at Save a Mexican Mutt, a charity dear to her generous heart.  We will miss you, Anna, and I am proud of every moment of enjoyment my writing brought to you.

To think that 72 hours ago, this was my view… of the increasingly dilapidated nature of our outbuildings at Red Gate Farm.  We have our summer’s work cut out for us, repairing the chicken house and woodshed.  We left in a flurry of laundry, scrubbing up the house so it will be welcoming to any guests who might want to use it as a retreat over the winter and spring.  It always seems so hard to believe summer will ever come, when we leave behind a crunchy lawn, a frozen brook.

Before that brook thaws and fills with its summer family of tadpoles and minnows, we have six months of life in London to accomplish.  We are back “home,” firmly ensconced once again in the familiar house, surrounded by friendly cats who missed us terribly.  I am happily again cooking with my beloved Aga whose constant source of warmth is a massive kitty-magnet this winter season.

After two days of Recovery By Nap, Avery is back at school, however reluctantly, and I have spent two gruelling days at Lost Property, dealing with the dozen or so bags of girls’ belongings that the staff somehow unearthed over the holidays.  Girls streamed in and out, exclaiming over beloved objects not seen for months, sighing in disappointment at the single shoe that has not turned up, the housekeys they are desperate not to confess they’ve lost, the Chemistry notes need “right now for a test!”  They sign out the belongings they find, in a meaningless little folder designed to make them take their responsibilities a bit more seriously.  I know I’m not in Connecticut anymore when I read their names: Arabella, Poppy, Flora, Astrid, Pippa.  I love England, and I love Lost Property.

The suitcases are unpacked of all their Christmas treasures, the holiday feeling a million years away, a dream.

Our last days at Red Gate Farm WERE like a dream, filled with visits from friends, visits to friends, forays into puzzle-solving…

John’s mom, back home in Iowa, mirrored us with her puzzle, one of my presents to her this Christmas, a gift only a grandmother could love.

It is hard to imagine our last peaceful, beautiful week of holiday without picturing a camera, or two, in Avery’s hands.  John gave her his old Leica for Christmas, then together they bought another camera and a macro lens to go with it.  But since these cameras depend on actual FILM, I have to wait to show them to you until they are all developed.  Who would have thought the world would go back to film?  Still, I have the results of her experiments with my camera.  She was in heaven, walking the property with her dad, finding magic in the details.

She has such a wonderful eye!  Even a humble broken-down hammock achieves beauty.

The little stone puppy who spends the winter on the picnic table, with his chicken friends, has new dignity.

The hydrangea tree, always luscious and celebratory in summer, and draped in rare Christmas light during the holiday, became a sort of sculpture, with the barn as background.

There was one sunset I will never forget.  The three of us walked all around the house, looking at the pink, vulnerable-looking sky with wonder.

Normally I race through my day without taking the time — at that moment — to appreciate what I have.  For once, though, that sunset evening, I looked at my stalwart, generous husband teaching our beautiful daughter to share his passion, and felt happy.  Right then.  I know I’ll never get enough of them, but that evening, I tried.

The most wonderful part of the overwhelming, exhausting, exhilarating holiday was having so much time with Avery.  I know the clock is ticking on her time in our house — we spend a lot of time talking about university these days — so it was a luxury like foie gras or a beach vacation, to have her around all the time.

We had one last lunch with dear Jill, Joel and the girls at their local diner (where the waitress says, “Hey, Jane and Molly!  Happy New Year!”), and luckily Avery had her super camera with her.

It is impossible to believe that we will miss six months of my nieces’ lives before July rolls around.  How they will have changed and grown!  Jane will be the age Avery was when we bought Red Gate Farm.

Life goes by so quickly that I really can’t think about missing so much of Jane’s and Molly’s.  Where did this little Avery go, anyway?

Nor can I think too much about leaving Red Gate Farm behind.  Will we ever see it in the spring or fall again, or only in the intense months of summer and winter?

Anne, David and Kate came along for a brilliant bagel brunch — Kate’s first bagel! — and a nice long chat, for the first time during the holidays.  Sometimes I think we are too ready to let our interactions with our beloved neighbors to be short and sweet, with the luxury of having them across the road.

It’s a completely different mood to sit in the sunshine — with dusty motes showing just how hard it is to keep that house clean! — and really discuss politics, life, Avery’s upcoming summer photography camp, child-raising, how much screen-time is too much for a three-year-old.  No one has ever taken Avery more seriously as a real person, since she was seven years old, as Anne and David.  Their special brand of respect for her is irreplaceable, and Kate’s total devotion not to be forgotten.  We were having too much fun even to take a picture.

By this point, the last day of our holidays, I was in such a state of happy exhaustion that I almost skipped my last bellringing outing.  “Don’t do it just to prove it can’t defeat you,” Avery advised, but I couldn’t help it.  So often I do not want to go — it’s hard and scary and intimidating — but I am never sorry when I do.  It was a brilliant afternoon of bellringing in Brewster, against the backdrop of another beautiful sunset.

That place has given me a great deal of happiness, as have the people within it.  Are all bellringing enthusiasts as simply welcoming as I have found?  Watching the really good ringers try a “London Minor” was completely intimidating.  Never!

One last supper in my farmhouse kitchen

The Ultimate Burger

(makes three)

1 lb bison mince

sprinkle of Fox Point Seasoning

ripe tomatoes, sliced

red onions, sliced

avocados, sliced

dollops of blue or goats cheese

dollops of crema di carciofi e aglio (creamy artichoke and garlic dip)

handful rocket/arugula leaves

3 eggs

toasted whole wheat rolls

In a very hot skillet, fry the burgers to your desired level of doneness.  At the end of cooking, place cheese on top of burgers.  Pile everything onto the wheat roll, then fry eggs (again, to desired level of doneness) and top burgers with eggs.  Supply vast numbers of napkins.

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 Of course this burger will benefit from the egg’s being plucked, as ours were, warm from under the hen owned by the couple who adopted little Jessica the kitten two summers ago and given to us with love.  I can’t promise any other egg will taste the same.

Now it is time for me to concoct an Avery-less supper as she spends the evening with friends, this cold, grey January London night.  Happy Friday the 13th!

Christmas — after all the planning, choosing, travelling, envelope-licking, parcel-wrapping, food-shopping and anticipation –finally arrived.  ‘Twas the season of unexpected knocks on the door, visitors bringing presents on a rush of cold air, blue-flamed logs burning in the fireplace, dozens of candles flickering, cars pulling up into the driveway and letting out the people we’ve waited months to see.  My beautiful mother, for example!

What a year she has had.  There has been the sadness and anxiety over my father, her adjusting to being left alone to deal with the endless problems our childhood home has presented her with, and then, last month, a heart scare that brought unexpected surgery and recovery.  My brother and sister have been there to support her through everything, but I have been able to see her only twice, worrying from afar and feeling that awful tug of being very, very far away.  To be able to hug her and chat with her, gossip and eat together, made Christmas a real gift.  And nothing says daughter love like… devilled eggs!  Her very favorite.

Mom’s Devilled Eggs

(makes 2 dozen)

12 eggs

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1 tbsp dijon mustard

1 tsp curry powder

sea salt and fresh black pepper to taste

paprika for dusting

Place eggs in a saucepan and cover with cold water.  Bring to a rolling boil and then turn off heat, covering the pan.  Leave eggs in boiled water for 15 minutes, then drain water and place eggs in a bowl and cover with running cold water for minute or two.  Peel eggs and cut in half lengthwise, then remove yolks and place in a small bowl.  Mash with a potato masher and mix in all over ingredients except paprika.  Arrange egg whites on a platter and spoon the yolk mixture into each.  Dust with paprika and serve.

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Christmas Eve saw all of us gathered around in the toasty holiday-ish house, my mother admiring the Christmas tree with its mass of ornaments old and new, my mother in law taking loads of photos, John tormenting Jane (or was it the other way around)…

Between stirring things and setting the table, I managed to get Molly up against the “measuring door.”  She’s such a tiny little sprout.

We ate.  My, how we ate!  Oyster stew (I had bought an entire GALLON of oysters, which sounds insane, but we ate every last one, eventually).

We also had four-cheese macaroni and cheese for the kids, and as a nod to my childhood traditions, a pile of rather dreadful egg rolls.

And I successfully lit the hydrangea tree candles, very lucky to have hit upon a nearly breezeless night.

Avery indulged her new passion for photography, braving the chilly night air.

Anne and David popped over to deliver Kate for a visit with her beloved chum Molly.  Their piano duet added a lot to the Christmas Eve festivities.

Christmas Day dawned cold and fair — no sign of snow this whole holiday, as a direct result, I think, of John’s mom having given us all incredibly cool snowshoes for Christmas!  We stare at them longingly.  Under the tree were the perfect presents for and from everyone.  Avery gave me this print.  So, so Avery.

I gave John eyelashes.  Yes, eyelashes, for our Fiat Cinquecento in London.  Here’s how the reaction to that present went:

Me: “You don’t look thrilled.  Don’t you want the car to have eyelashes?”

John: “Well, it feels slightly… emasculating.”

Avery: “Daddy, you drive a Cinquecento.  That ship has already sailed.”

There were the usual iPhoto books and regular books — I gave John a first edition of Vita Sackville-West’s history of her ancestral home, Knole.  Avery of course got a camera.

Or two cameras.  Or three, I forget.  She and John and John’s mom share the obsession.

John gave me hats for my eggs, as befits a girl who gives her husband eyelashes for his car.

We packed ourselves up and jumped in the car to go to Jill and Joel’s.  About five minutes into the drive, Avery let out a blood-curdling scream.  “DON’T DO THAT WHEN I’M DRIVING!” John screeched in return.  “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m really sorry, but what just happened was totally scream-worthy.  A MOUSE just jumped from the backseat ONTO MY COLLARBONE and ricocheted off onto the floor!”

Everyone screamed.  We pulled off the road and jumped out of the car.  “Open all the doors!”  We stood around in the cold.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to get back in,” John said.  “We have to go; it’s Christmas.”

So we climbed gingerly back in and pulled into the road again.

“Awkward silence,” Avery said.

About ten minutes later Rosemary screamed.

“I didn’t think I would!” she apologized.  “I thought, ‘If it turns up again, there’s no element of surprise.  We know he’s here.  I won’t scream.’  But it appears to be a reflex!”

“How much longer is this drive?” Avery asked.

It was the longest 40 minutes of our lives.

We arrived and leaped out of the car, leaving all the doors open and revealing our story to our bewildered audience.  “Put Snowball in the car and shut all the doors,” I suggested, referring to their homicidal cat.  But it was determined that a better plan was just to leave the doors open as long as possible.  John discovered a disgusting mouse nest in the first-aid kit area in the back and cleared it out.  “I think these are our air bags,” he said, gesturing to the pile of shredded nest material.

UGH.

The beauty of Jill’s decorations washed away all the mousiness, however.  What a gorgeous house.

Christmas dinner was sublime, and many more presents exchanged.  Among them my beautiful new mercury glass candlesticks from my sister, which graced our table on Boxing Day.

We ate ourselves silly — Joel’s perfect roasted turkey, my cheesy spinach and stuffing with fresh sage, sausage and cream, shredded potatoes baked with cream cheese.  Then Jill brought out a pile of notes she’d found in her childhood closet, written when she was Avery’s age, and she read them aloud.  Lists like “Things I hate about my life,” and then on the other side a much shorter list, “Things that are OK about my life,” and “Things to Do” which included goals like “Get Chris interested in me” — with a checkmark next to it!  “Get super skinny,” “Be Valedictorian” — another checkmark.  We laughed till we cried.

Finally home, on a beautiful moonlit night, to see the house nestled in the corner of the road, looking demure and cozy.

It has been the sort of time when we reap the benefits of all the relationships we sow during the year.  Living so far away as we do, it sometimes feels daunting to stay close to all the people who “people” our life.  The next few days brought visits from our friends Mark and Lilian, who adopted the kitty Jessica two summers ago, and Rollie and Judy who laughed till THEY cried over the story of the Car Ride With Santa Mouse.  We visited Young Rolllie and Tricia to meet their baby goats, and to see how much Even Younger Rollie has grown.

We drove into nearby Ridgefield to Luc’s Cafe to devour piles of frites and exchange Christmas greetings with our friends Shelley and Erik, Cassandra and Rebecca.  Just look what Cassandra made for us.

The most thoughtful gift I can ever imagine.  Thank you, Cassandra.

Through all the festivities, I looked from my mother to John’s mother, feeling terribly grateful that with all they have been through, they are still here with us to celebrate.  Look at the gorgeous photograph John’s mom took of the three generations of my mom’s family.

Many beautiful images of our holiday came from Avery’s new camera!  She has signed up for a photography camp this summer, although I cannot really see how she can learn much more.  She captures so much.

Mom, Andy, Jill and I spent one afternoon together just hanging around their house with the two girls, watching highlights of the year in sports, playing board games the girls got for Christmas, preparing a huge tray of scalloped potatoes to go with the ham I had brought, roasting in the oven.  John, his mom, Avery and Joel trooped off to the movies.  The perfect way for all of us to spend the afternoon.

Finally with many hugs and kisses and “Merry Christmas” greetings, Mom and Andy went home.  To comfort us from the separation, John and I celebrated our 22nd wedding anniversary!

The best way to celebrate was with a long walk across the preservation land, with our resident photographer on hand to document all the flora.

And to recover from all the Christmas food, we made the perfect savoury dish.

Eggplant Salsa

(serves 6)

4 tbsps olive oil

2 large eggplants, peeled and diced

a large white onio, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2 large cans whole plum tomatoes

large bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped

sea salt and black pepper to taste

1 1/2 cups basmati rice, steamed

grated Parmesan to sprinkle

Simply saute the eggplant, onion and garlic in the olive oil until soft.  Add tomatoes, squeezing them into pieces as you add them.  Simmer, stirring occasionally, for at least 1 hour.  At this point the salsa can sit until you want to heat it up to eat it.  The flavors improve over time.  When you are ready to eat, add the chopped parsley and season to taste.  Serve over steamed rice and top with cheese.

************

This is the perfect antidote to all that stuffing and turkey!  And if you need another such idea, how about a massive pot of spinach soup?

Spinach Soup

(serves at least 6)

2 tbsps butter

6 cloves garlic, chopped roughly

1 white onion, chopped roughly

2 lbs spinach leaves, washed

pinch fresh nutmeg

4 cups chicken (or duck) stock, or enough to cover about 2/3 of spinach in pot

1/2 cup light cream

Heat butter in a  heavy-bottomed pot.  Saute garlic and onion until soft, then add spinach and nutmeg and cover with stock.  Simmer until spinach is soft, then blitz with a hand blender and add cream.

New Year’s Eve came, and so did Anne and David and Katie, for cassoulet and ice cream.  And the morning brought an intense desire to turn the house from Christmas into New Year’s.  We flew about, packing boxes, dragging trees and wreaths into the woods to join those from last year, and the year before that.  John hoovered, John’s mom and I cleaned the silver and moved furniture!  And all was tidy and fresh.

And so happy 2012 to all of you, dear readers.  May we all look back on 2011 with understanding and compassion for its pitfalls and losses, its joys and sorrows.  I hope the New Year brings you all you wish for.

We arrived in the middle of the night on Friday, our jetlag routed a bit by a suicidal/homicidal driver from JKF.  I was thisclose to shouting, “Pull over, you lunatic, and let my husband drive!”  Finally we descended the exit ramp off the murderous highway and onto the quiet country road to the house and I have never been so relieved in my life.  Thankfully Avery slept right through it, but the hand I had resting on her sweatered, sleeping back was sweaty as we emerged from the car into safety.

Rollie and Judy had, as always, visited in the afternoon to fill the fridge and turn on heat and lights, and to leave five fragrant balsam wreaths on the front step.  Could we have any better neighbors?  I also suspect Anne and David had done some elf work on that subject, so we had food to welcome us.  And my dears, the relief of seeing all the house repairs we had worried over in perfect order!  We have walls and ceilings again!  And our decision to leave the laths we found last summer exposed — but plastered warmly between — was a brilliant one.  Just look.

We dumped our suitcases and investigated the state of the bedrooms.  The good news?  I had made the beds before I locked up and left in September.  The bad news?  Some furry friends had taken up residence in various spots — a bathroom towel, the inside of my goosedown slipper — and left little tokens of their presence over the autumn.  I hate to think how to express to them that they are not really welcome at Red Gate Farm.

We fell into bed feeling that lowering of blood pressure and raising of Christmas spirit that always fills us on our first night “home for the holidays.”

The morning revealed a rather bleak, snowless Connecticut landscape.  How bare my precious hydrangea looks, before it receives its gifts of Victorian candle holders.

The winterberry is thriving, though.

It’s amazing what I can accomplish when I get up, jetlagged, at 6:30 a.m.!  By mid morning we had been to the grocery store and unpacked all our Christmas gifts and clothes.  We popped Avery into the car and drove to Judy’s brother’s gorgeous farm, perched high above the Connecticut valley, to find Judy herself in residence concocting priceless wreaths and garlands.

“You made it!” she said, giving me her usual tight hug.  “Are you ready to choose your trees?”  it was difficult to narrow down from the choices of unbelievably, magically fragrant beauties!

For the first time this season, I felt that frisson of holidayness, that sense of mindless excitement and anticipation.  We chose our two trees and dear Rollie strapped them to the car in the biting wind.

We came home with trees and various garnishes via a wood-seller, which meant we had our work cut out for us later in the day.  Indeed, a bit of the pile still awaits stacking even today.

The new innovation to the decorating scheme this year is this gorgeous, clever sculpture, made by Judy!

We got right to work decorating, and it was worth all the effort.

A quick trip to the vintage shop in Woodbury yielded this little treasure from 1940s Germany, one of my new favorites this year to add to the trove in the cupboard.

Finally my energy flagged.  I carried a few more paltry pieces of wood into the woodshed, then put on a pot of brisket to simmer slowly in Guinness, tomatoes and garlic, and took a long, cozy nap.  What a joy it was to wake up in the dark and hang even more ornaments on the tree.  Finally we were finished.

The brisket was tender and all we could have hoped it would be, but we had barely finished chewing and swallowing when we all realized we were falling asleep in our plates.  A last view through the window, and then to sleep, me with my copy of “When it Snowed That Night” open on my lap.

We were up again with the birds!  Off to Jill and Joel’s to get our massive pile of packages that Joel had kindly been accepting all fall (thank you, dear brother in law).  We piled everything in the car and John looked at me and laughed.  “Look at you, accomplishing all this and normally you wouldn’t even be UP by this hour!”

And I went bell-ringing!  I have been looking forward since September to my reunion with my beloved Brewster band, especially to delivering to them the tiny refrigerator I had bought for the tower in hot, hot August, but was prevented from delivering by the wretched hurricane.  How beautiful the tower was in the waning light, and what fun we had ringing.  I am a better ringer than I was in September, but it is still a huge challenge to keep up with that very talented group of people.  “You’re improving, Kristen!” said a nice bearded fellow who is terribly high up in the ringing world.  “No, no,” I moaned, “you guys are so patient.”  He put his hands on my shoulders.  “Look at me and listen.  Accept the praise and encouragement!  It happens seldom enough in this life.”

I left behind the fridge and my giant offering of warm cannellini beans with rosemary and garlic, a gift to them all for their dinner and caroling party that evening.  I myself skipped the party in order to be reunited with John’s mom, who had flown into White Plains!  She and John and Avery climbed the bell tower steps to watch me for a minute, and off we went.

Sometimes it is brilliant just to pick up a pizza laden with absolutely everything — extra cheese, sausage, ripe olives, red onions and peppers! — and go home!  So we did, arriving to show Nonna all the decorations and to get her settled in her cozy room with the red rug, the walls covered with our favorite photos and maps and works of art, the table piled with carefully chosen books, and my favorite photo of Grandpa Jack.

We all trooped into the sitting room to admire the tree, the fire crackling merrily, the decorations.  What a perfect joy it is to get my mother in law into my house and know that for the foreseeable future, she is with us, safe and sound.

Monday took us into the city!

We checked into the darling Duane Street Hotel in our old stomping grounds of Tribeca and promptly engaged on a trip down memory lane.  Here is my former, precious art gallery, now purveyor of only slightly tasteless lingerie.

I asked the perennial and rhetorical question.  “If I couldn’t pay the rent selling $100,000 paintings, how do they manage with the occasional bustier?”  I know, I know.  Volume.

And here is Avery, all grownup and waxing nostalgic, in the schoolyard of our beloved PS 234, outside the famous red door where she was standing on September 11, 2001.

And here she is with the new 1 World Trade Center rising bravely in the background.  That’s how close we were, on the day.

“Everything looks so much smaller than I remembered!” Avery marvelled, strolling around the “yard”, remembering days and years gone by.  Her modish outfit got looks of interest from the rather more casually dressed moms, dads and nannies who waited for their little ones.

Off we went to meet my best pal Alyssa and her family, to tour the September 11 memorial.  This plan had been in place since summer, and I had stolidly refused to think about it.  But here we were, so we went.  And after an initial stomach-achy feeling of strangeness and sadness, we began to feel the peace of the place wash over us.

We stood in the cold, still air, listening to the pervasive, gentle, comforting sound of the endless flow of water.  “Listen,” said Alyssa in hushed awe.  “You can’t hear anything else.  The traffic, the construction sounds, everything is drowned by the sound of the water.”

It was true.

We reminisced about what had happened to us that day, in the days afterward.  “Annabelle,” I said, “do you remember that for ages afterward you were afraid of the steam coming out of manhole covers?  That was because of the smoke you saw that day…”  Elliot was silent and respectful, being only a glimmer in his mother’s eye on the day.

I asked a policeman how much taller the building was going to get.  “About ten stories, till it’s 1776 feet high,” he said, gazing down at me from his huge, blue-clad bulk.

We took a moment to be boundlessly grateful that we were not there to look for a name of someone beloved we had lost.  So many people were.  This particular engraving broke my heart, as I thought of Elliot.

It is beautiful, the way the names have been arranged.  The firemen are all together, in their ladders, their engines, their battalions.  The bravest, the First Responders.

Office workers — one imagines them sitting at their desks with cups of coffee on the day, joking with their co-workers on that beautiful blue-sky day — are grouped with their colleagues and deskmates, when the family survivors knew enough to say so.

Together every work day, they are together now forever.

“You know what is wonderful about this memorial?” Avery mused.  “It’s very much not about what happened.  It’s about the victims’ families and their feelings.”  That is the brilliance of the memorial, we all decided.  Somehow the horrific nature of the CAUSE of so many deaths has been transformed into a quiet, dignified way never to forget the individuality of loss.   I think if my mother or brother or husband or child were here, I would be comforted.  I hope so much that the families are.

From the memorial, we went, appropriately, to a cozy, candlelit dinner at Roc, home of my brilliant restaurateur friend Rocco, the ebullient chef who fed everyone in the neighborhood with endless generosity, in the long sad days after September 11.  How wonderful to be reunited with him!

We sat there, our two families, and ate ourselves silly.  Truffled French fries!  Calamari.  Giant ravioli filled with beef rib confit, in a truffle cream sauce.  Simply heaven, but then I could have eaten splinters and loved it, being with Alyssa.

What an overwhelming flood of emotion, surrounded by so many of my favorite people, filled with memories of terrible days and wonderful days.  And so lovely to see Avery and Annabelle reunited, like the cousins they really are, in their hearts.

In the morning we headed up to Rockefeller Center and a flurry of shopping!

About this I cannot tell you, because of all the SECRETS.

We meandered back downtown for John’s and my traditional wedding-anniversary dinner at Nobu, while Avery and her grandmother indulged in yet more shopping.  My memory is still replete with the gluttonous details of our lunch: the bluefin tuna with caviar and wasabi, the yellowtail with jalapenos and coriander, the tuna tataki with tiny slivers of garlic, ginger, spring onion and Ponzu sauce, the soft shell crab roll, the rock shrimp Tempura.  Gorgeous.

And home we came, exhausted by tired feet, exhilarated by adventure and celebration, a little overwhelmed with emotion.  That is what Christmas is all about, after all.  The memories of both joy and sorrow, the longing for those no longer with us and gratitude for those we can reach out and touch.

Merry Christmas, all.  And thank you to my dear daughter for all these beautiful photographs.

]]> http://www.kristeninlondon.com/news/of-memories-and-a-memorial/feed 8 http://www.kristeninlondon.com/news/our-delicious-approach-to-the-holidays http://www.kristeninlondon.com/news/our-delicious-approach-to-the-holidays#comments Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:14:56 +0000 kristen http://www.kristeninlondon.com/?p=6164  

Tis the season when every evening, the three of us convene to ask, “What do you have on for tomorrow?”  There has been plenty to do, starting with a whole series of musical events at Avery’s school.

For these, I arm myself with a handful of tissues, since nothing brings witless tears to my eyes quite like the sound of girls’ voices, singing in heavenly imperfection.  There was the “Singing Tea,” a phrase that makes my American relations laugh.  What on earth?  How does a tea sing?  British people will understand that it means a concert of the girls who take singing lessons at school, preceded by a tea.  That is, a period of standing around clutching cups of tea and watching the girls themselves wolf down untold pieces of cake, having skipped lunch in order to rehearse.

Sandwiched as she was between Hayden and Bach, Mozart and Brahms, Avery’s piece was more funny than even it normally is.  “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” of course, by the incomparable American mathematician and songwriter Tom Lehrer.  “My heart will be quickenin’, with each drop of strychnine…”  Perfect for our intensely satirical daughter.

Then we were onto the Junior Choir singing “Cry Me a River” at the Soiree Musicale.  They were heavenly.  I needed my tissues.

And then there was the week-long adventure of the much-anticipated school musical, “Sweet Charity.”

The musical was sublime: the dancers professionally in time with one another, the lead charming, and the ensemble full of crazy energy.  Granted, the plot which centers on “dance hall hostess” bemoaning the loss of their innocence while they solicit clients and drink and smoke, is not one I would naturally have chosen for a girls’ school whose cast runs the gamut from 12–18.  But as a friend of mind pointed out, maybe it was just this sort of daring subject matter that grabbed the interest of the older girls.  At one point Avery was singing and dancing right in front, practically in the laps of the audience, so we fatuously chose those seats every evening.  It was such fun.

Finally there was the Christmas Carol Service in the Hall, a room of such elegant proportions that I always feel I’m in a Harry Potter movie.

My mother asked if the girls sang traditional carols, and I replied, “Yes, so traditional that they sing them in LATIN.”  Simply heartbreakingly beautiful, all of them in their black concert clothes, shining faces illuminated by hand-held lights, every one of them gorgeous in her own way.  On the brink of everything.

On top of all these events, we’ve been attending far more than our share of school Christmas Fairs, getting ideas for our own Fair in a year’s time, for which John is totally responsible!  I think it is wonderful that a girls’ school is happy to have a father in charge.  A good example to the girls for what a husband and dad can be.  And naturally, we’ve been decorating our own house, too.

There is of course the tree itself.

It is lovely, but I am bemoaning a bit the new trend in trees: someone has bred one that doesn’t drop its needles but also doesn’t smell like a Christmas tree.  This is our fate, this season.  I have hopes for a smelly tree in Connecticut.  The beauties of shopping for Christmas decorations in England far outweigh a non-fragrant tree, though.  With our lovely friends Vincent and Peter we went strolling (or rather pushing our way through choking crowds) down Columbia Road in the East End.  What an experience!  We looked up at one point and saw this fellow.

Avery is officially in love with the East End: Shoreditch, Hackney and Bethnal Green, not the least for the messages the residents leave for their reading public.

I especially like this last one for the very expressive size of the font.  It’s as though the writer begins by feeling terribly emphatic and annoyed with his neighbors, then begins to lose steam, and finally at the end seems to regret being so angry.

We repaired to Vincent and Peter’s cozy home where they plied us with various tarts and quiches, among them this beauty made with red onions, black olives and sardines (photo courtesy of Avery).

And then we came home with five gorgeous (if lethally prickly) wreaths made of real holly, as only the English can do.  They adorn the back windows of the kitchen.

Avery has, of course, set up her annual ice-skating pond with its lead skaters and sledders, giving strict instructions to anyone who visits to wash hands after touching!  This year saw the addition of some amazing “Insta-Snow”, which works by sprinkling water on a very tiny amount of powder, causing it to fluff up many times its original size!

To keep up our strength during all these festivities, on the advice of my cooking friend Caz, I made these:

Sophie Grigson’s Christmas Sprouts

(serves 6–8 as a side dish)

675 g brussels sprouts

100 g smoked duck breast or bacon, cut into strip

50 g toasted chopped hazelnuts

15 g butter

1 tbsp sunflower oil

300 ml double cream

2 tsp turmeric

dash of lemon juice

4 tbsp breadcrumbs

3 tbsp finely grated parmesan

3–4 tbsp chopped parsley

Trim the sprouts of their outer, tough leaves.  Place the sprouts into a saucepan of simmering salted water and cook for 4–5 minutes, until almost, but not quite, cooked. Drain thoroughly, allow to cool slightly, then cut in half.

Place the butter and oil into a wide frying pan over a medium heat. Add the bacon lardons and almonds and sauté for 3–4 minutes, until lightly browned.

Add the sprouts and sauté for a further 2–3 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add the cream and bring the mixture to the boil. Boil for 2–4 minutes, until the cream has reduced to a rich sauce. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Remove from the heat, add the lemon juice and spoon into an ovenproof gratin dish.

Mix the breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese together in a bowl, then sprinkle evenly over the top of the sprout mixture.

Place into the oven and bake for 18–20 minutes, until the top is golden.

I am not a massive fan of sprouts but even I really liked these.  Go easy on the breadcrumbs as you want the end result to be quite creamy.

One of John’s and my holiday outings was a nearly complete bust, so let me pass on my intelligence.  “Taste of Christmas” sounded so wonderful!  We have always loved “Taste of London,” a food fair at which lots of top restaurants turn up to serve tiny portions of their signature dishes.  Lovely chance to wander through Regent’s Park — even in the rain, as it was in June! — and eat sumptuously, facing far too many choices, and walking away feeling stuffed and gluttonous.

I didn’t read the small print on “Taste of Christmas,” which turned out to be at the ExCel conference center — depressing! — over an hour’s drive to the Docklands, in short, the area far, FAR East where the Olympics are going to take place!  You can imagine how far one must go to find land in London on which to build giant stadiums.  That’s how far we drove.  And upon arrival, we discovered only SIX restaurants were taking part and the rest was a mishmash of unattractive Christmas ornaments and mostly-useless kitchen implements.  Once there, however, we tried to have fun, and sampled all the food there was, plus we found a very exciting silicon mat that one can place directly on the burner of an Aga stove and fry things!  Like these peppers, stuffed with goat’s cheese.

The only other lasting good thing from the dismal fair in the middle of nowhere was this salmon dish from Rhodes W1, which I’ve replicated as best as my taste buds can accomplish.

Olive-oil-Poached and Smoked Salmon Terrine with Sweet Lemon Dressing and Microherbs

(serves 6 as a starter)

2 cups olive oil

300 g/10.5 ounces fresh salmon fillet

200g/7 ounces cream cheese

200g/7 ounces creme fraiche

1 tsp capers

handful baby cress

handful baby shiso (Japanese coriander)

handful chives

handful fresh tarragon leaves

juice of 1/2 lemon

pinch salt

300g/10.5 ounces smoked salmon

dressing:

1/4 extra-virgin olive oil

juice and zest of 1/2 lemon

1 tsp clear honey

fresh ground black pepper

Bring the cups of olive oil to what can only be called a “shimmer”.  It’s short of the temperature for frying, but a piece of breadcrumb will move about if you drop it in.  Carefully lower in the salmon fillets and cook at this temperature for three minutes, then carefully turn the fillets over and cook for another 3–4 minutes until JUST cooked through.  Remove and drain on paper towels.

In a food processor, combine the poached salmon, the cream cheese, creme fraiche, capers, HALF the quantity of all the herbs (reserve the other half for garnishing), the lemon juice and seasonings.  Pulse until well combined but not a total mush.  Taste for seasonings and add salt if needed.

Combine dressing ingredients and set aside.

At this point, you may decide if you’d like to serve this dish as a sit-down starter or as a finger food.  If as a starter, choose a platter on which you’d like to serve the terrine and place a piece of plastic wrap twice as big as the platter in the center of it.  In as close as you can come to a rectangle that’s about half the size of a piece of typing paper, place a layer of smoked salmon slices on the plastic.  Spread a layer of the poached salmon mixture on top.  Cover with another layer of smoked salmon, another layer of mousse, and finish with a top layer of smoked salmon.  Cover with the extra plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least four hours, or overnight. Then unwrap the terrine and lay it on a cutting board.  Carefully, with a serrated knife, saw the terrine into perfect strips about an inch wide.  This recipe should yield 8 strips.  Arrange on the serving platter.  Sprinkle the reserved herbs over and drizzle with dressing.

If on the other hand you’d like to serve the dish as a finger food, simply spoon a bit of the mousse on a baguette slice, top with a bit of smoked salmon and a sprinkle of herbs, and drizzle dressing over each portion.

Our wonderful neighbors Suzanne and John came to share this with us, to investigate all the Christmas decorations, and most surprisingly, to offer to give our tree a second home when we leave next week!  How wonderful to recycle our own tree, and not into pulp, but into a second family’s celebration.

Finally, as a glorious, hard-won Christmas gift to myself, today I managed to triumph over a so-far impossible bell-ringing challenge.  You’ve heard me rant on about “Plain Hunt on Five” which simply means a method where all the bells change their order in a pre-ordained pattern.  Until now I absolutely could not see the pattern!  No matter how many different ways were offered to explain it, I could not see it.

Until this morning!  I have had a week’s enforced absence from the Tower after pulling a muscle in my shoulder, and the challenges of ringing had assumed epic proportions, as any challenge does when one is not allowed to address it!  But today all the pieces fell into place.  My teacher handed me the rope to the heaviest bell, the Tenor, and said, “Right, cover on Plain Hunt.  Backstroke/handstroke over the five, then the three, then the one, then the two, then the four, then all over again till we say stop.”

And it clicked!  We were ringing for a special service involving the parish children, called “Christingle” service where the children all carry lighted candles tucked into oranges and walk up the central aisle.  So we had an audience of parents, kneeling with their children, pointing to the ropes and to the computer monitor mounted on the wall, showing the bells in the belfry, swinging to and fro.  “That’s what’s making the sounds!” parents explained.  And I was able to keep my place, not perfectly mind you, but to keep it, and to take my place in the so-familiar tune of Plain Hunt.  Onward and upward straight afterward, to another method called Grandsire Doubles, and I could keep my place there too.

“You’ll be really helpful to us now,” said one very advanced ringer who’s never spoken to me before.  “Now we can ring a lot of methods we can’t ring if we don’t have 6 or 8 proper ringers.”  Joy!  I am a proper ringer now, or at least approaching one.  A lovely Christmas gift for me.  I hope very much your holiday preparations are including some happy-making moments for you, too.

Mostly what I am doing is recuperating from our Thanksgiving revelries.  I think every fork, knife and spoon, every roasting tray, platter and spatula, every pitcher, glass and plate, was pressed into service!  How delicious were the savoury flavors of garlic, sage, ham and turkey, the lofty spoonsful of potatoes cooked with sharp Cheddar and shallots, the spinach with celery and Gruyere.

 Is there any marriage more felicitous than that of buttery carrots with Demarara sugar and black pepper?

I had forgotten the clear, tangy delight of cranberries simmered in cinnamony orange juice.

 Of course I can never look at cranberries without thinking of my parents’ first married Thanksgiving.  In my family, there is nothing more memorable than a memory of someone else’s memory, and the story of my father’s adventure with cranberries is legend.  “These don’t seem to be moving in this blender,” he told my mother.  [What cranberries were doing in a blender in any case is a mystery to me.]  “Stir them up a bit and see what happens,” she advised, not thinking to add, “Turn the blender off first.”  They always claimed that when they moved house years later, they were still finding bits of macerated cranberry behind the curtains.

That was the same ill-fated Thanksgiving when my mother’s sleeve caught on her bathroom shelf full of perfumes brought back from a summer in Europe.  What a fragrant Thanksgiving it must have been, I imagine now.

 And then, at the last minute when their guests were arriving, my father pulled the turkey out of the oven and tipped the cooking fat right back inside, watching in dismay as it caught on smoky fire!  I could only imagine, last night, peering anxiously at my own bird.

My poor parents, struggling through a newlywed holiday full of disaster upon disaster.   What I love about family stories is how quickly they turn from tragedy to comedy, usually within an hour or two.  How happy they must have been when the last guests left and they could close the door behind them and begin turning the day into a legend.

Our own turkey-cooking yesterday was its usual unscientific, “let’s try this and see what happens” fiasco.  Brining in herbs and kosher salt and peppercorns, of course.

The night before, as the best of husbands will do on such occasions, John sent me a link to a story about turning my expected four-hour cooking time into two.  Why this would be appealing I do not know, since the whole day is spent in the kitchen anyway.  The revolutionary method involved flipping the poor bird over in all its boiling cooking liquid (“ow, that went right through my SOCK!” John moaned at one memorable moment) several times, which was unduly stressful.  Out came the thermometer.  “It’s cooking way too fast, turn down the heat!”  Then another stab.  “Hang on, now it’s cold inside.”

Sigh.

Oven turned up, oven down, turkey in, turkey out, covered in foil, uncovered in order that we could snatch away bits of crisp skin to “test it.”

And then as I was sprinkling “sugar” on my carrots to caramelise them, it was only in the nick of time that I noticed my “sugar” was in fact… couscous. (It probably would have been a great dish, carrots and couscous, but not at that moment.)

In short, it was a typical Thanksgiving afternoon.

 In years past, however happy our Thanksgivings have been here in our adopted homeland, I have always felt a bit melancholy, a bit homesick for the holidays of childhood when children and guests were hanging around all day, watching football and having a day off usual activities.   It seemed sad to me, the first few years we were here, to have the day quite and alone while child and husband were at school and work, to have the dinner at night just like any ordinary dinner party.

Suddenly last night, though, I looked around at my beloved guests – old friends and new – and realized that this is the new normal.  I dote on the moment when Avery and her friends beat a tattoo on the front door, rushing in with cold cheeks, demanding snacks, then settling down to homework before dinner.  I really love seeing my guests come in from the windy darkness, bearing pies and flowers and wine, everyone excited to have “a real American Thanksgiving.”  Somehow every year we manage to have people round for whom it’s their first Thanksgiving, and this makes everything exciting and festive.

The girls at the far end of the table – the teenage end – read aloud a blessing I had concocted from reading various friends’ lovely messages about their holidays.

“We welcome you here to our American holiday.  We are thankful for Thanksgiving — a time to pause and reflect on the joys and sorrows that a full life contains, to appreciate the gifts of love and life, to cherish the memory of those who are not present, to recognize our absolute gratitude to friends and family who ARE present.  Today we think of the love we feel for those closest to us, and we hold dear all our hopes for the future and for reconciliations to come. Thank you, Thanksgiving.”

We explained to our English guests that it had been people just like them who bravely climbed on the Mayflower to endure the hideous journey to the New World and the winter of sickness to come, during which half their number died.  “They left England seeking greater religious persecution than was available at home,” John deadpanned, paraphrasing Garrison Keillor.  It is hard to believe that our excessively jolly, festive holiday has any roots in despair and hunger.

I now feel that the sense of wonder, of appreciation for our American traditions, the grateful consumption of my lovingly prepared dishes, is the best Thanksgiving we could ask for.  It has a different quality from the familiar childhood holidays full of family faces we saw every year on that day.  Every year here, in what have become our real lives, there is a feeling of newness to the splendour of the occasion.

Sitting here in the peaceful church, selling Christmas cards to absolutely no one, gazing on my beloved bellchamber and anticipating the hard work that tomorrow’s practice will bring, the friendly banter among us as we pull our ropes in the blinking sunshine coming through the windows, I am content.

Turkey Meatball Soup

(feeds the multitudes)

1 turkey carcass, plus the vegetables that roasted with it in the tin

2 lbs/1 kilo ground turkey (turkey mince)

enough breadcrumb/milk mixture to make the meatballs JUST stick together — perhaps 3/4 cup of each

pinch onion powder

pinch garlic powder

pinch dried parsley

pinch salt

4 carrots, sliced

4 stalks celery, sliced

1 cup tiny pasta stars, already cooked

Simmer turkey carcass in enough cold water to cover him for as long as you can, several hours at least.  Poke at the carcass to remove the meat from the bones whenever you pass by.

Pass the turkey broth through a sieve into a stock pot (this is an important step: one year I poured it RIGHT DOWN THE DRAIN).

Mix the turkey mince with the milk, breadcrumbs and herbs until all is thoroughly mixed.  Bring turkey broth to a high simmer and form golf-ball-sized meatballs to drop into it, one by one.  When they float to the surface, add the sliced carrots and celery and simmer for 20 minutes.  Add the cooked pasta and ENJOY.

Happy Thanksgiving!

All I could do in the way of physical activity was to ride my bike every day, gently, with John.  The views of our bike path along the river were restorative.

It has been a beautiful autumn here in London, with unusually bright, beautiful leafy color.  We often wish we were back in New England for the traditional incandescent foliage, but this year in real England, we could not complain.

Over the weekend, though, giant Hoovering trucks trundled down the road into the village, which had been covered with ankle-deep piles of orange leaves, and sucked them all up.  The sidewalks are bare now, waiting for the last few crunchy bits to fall from the trees.  The wind, too, has changed from a bracing freshness to a lashing dampness that turns hands on bicycle handlebars into red icy paws.

The best thing for icy paws is hot soup.

Broccoli Soup With Nutmeg and Gorgonzola

(serves 6)

2 tbsps butter

4 cloves garlic

1 large shallot

2 heads broccoli, separated into florets

pinch fresh nutmeg

chicken stock nearly to cover (perhaps 4 cups)

3 tbsps Gorgonzola or other creamy blue cheese

3 tbsps creme fraiche

sea salt and lots of fresh black pepper

In a heavy saucepan, melt butter and add garlic, shallots and broccoli, sprinkle the nutmeg over and stir to coat everything in the butter.  Pour in enough chicken stock nearly to cover, but not quite.  You do not want the soup to become water.  Simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure you get all the broccoli under the liquid.  When broccoli is soft, remove from heat and puree with hand blender.  Add cheese and creme fraiche, place back on heat and stir until cheese is melted.  Season, being sure to add plenty of black pepper till soup is slightly spicy.  Serve hot.

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My paws have been particularly occupied with adventures in bell-ringing!  This crazy activity of mine — half sport, half musical instrument — has been both a joy and a curse.  Sometimes, as I wake up on a Sunday morning to find something decent to wear, hop on my bike and turn up at my dear St Margaret’s to spend an hour pulling ropes and exhausting myself, I think, “Why on earth am I putting myself through this?  I could be sitting quietly with Hello! magazine, or even sleeping.”

The reason I persevere is partly pure stubbornness!  I can’t bear the thought of having put all this effort into learning the craft only to drop it.  This week is the six-month anniversary of my first lesson, and it has taken just this long for me to feel a true member of the community.  Last week eight of us gathered to ring for a special Evensong, celebrating a local composer who had been awarded one of English Heritage’s “blue plaques.”  The church itself was magical in the crisp darkness.

So was the bellchamber, with my beloved teacher Howard bringing down the “spider” that holds all the ropes.

The band gathered around — me, plus seven men, mufflers wound round their necks, blowing on their hands.  We rang.  The churchgoers appeared in their Sunday best, bringing children over to admire the bell-ringing.  I suddenly felt an enormous pride in my being able to turn seven ringers into eight, to make us a full band, a ringer for every bell, a full octave present.  I was a needed, valuable part of my small, chosen community.

Last weekend saw me at the ultimate crazy activity: an entire day out in the Surrey countryside, in the remote and beautiful villages of Limpsfield, Merstham and Bletchingley, ringing ALL day long in training.

As difficult as the day was, six straight hours trying desperately to learn “Plain Hunt on Six” and “Plain Hunt on Eight,” it was an accomplishment.  Surrounded by lovely people, gorgeous architecture and country views.

It was just my luck — I think! — that I was given the toughest, most experienced ringer in all the United Kingdom to spend the day with, having my every movement scrutinized, and yes, being shouted at.  He rang at the Royal Wedding!

The exhaustion coming home was tangible.  Muscles I didn’t even know I had, hurt.

And up first thing in the morning to ring for our beautiful Remembrance Day services.

There is no doubt in my mind that my new vocation has provided a very satisfying distraction from my other primary activity: watching my teenage daughter grow up and away.  She celebrated her 15th birthday this month, with new headphones, a silver bracelet, piles of books.

Fifteen is a real milestone.   For one thing, I remember being 15 myself!  I was  my real self that year, the self I am now.  So I know that the daughter I gaze upon now is the real person she will live with, all her life.  I like very much what I see.  She is immensely funny, a great debater, a truly liberal thinker, and a loyal friend who views gossip as a behavior only slightly more civilized than littering.  She has an enviable sense of style, even if sometimes it expresses itself through poems written in ink all over her hands.

The other side of this shiny coin is, however, the gradual withdrawal of the little, dependent, hand-holding child I was used to all these years.  Of course this development took place gradually… one day she simply brought herself home from school alone and that was that.  She took her first taxi ride alone, her first Tube ride alone and turned up safe and sound.  Stuffed animals no longer went along on sleepovers, her bookshelves became filled with books I have not read, her Facebook page filled with people I have not met.  The sort of cringe-making school photos she always hated are replaced with professional headshots, taken for her acting agency.

In short, the child I poured so much of myself into, spent so many seemingly endless hours reading to, marching people in and out of her dollhouse, arranging magnetic letters on the fridge to spell her own personal version of “Mommy,” has metamorphosed into a young lady.  I find the transition completely baffling, and while I know it has taken place over a number of years, sometimes the new Avery seems quite unbelievable to me, dignified, intellectual, a bit remote.  As much as I cherished every stage, they all sped by anyway, leaving me with an independent near-adult.

Now, Avery and John will roll their eyes as I say this, but… there is a very useful parallel in this process to bell-ringing.  Stick with me here.

What makes English bells unique is that they live on a wheel, which lives on a frame.  European bells just live on a frame and hang downward all their lives, being able to chime only in a very limited back-and-forth motion.  English bells can live downward OR upward, as we choose.  Some churches store their bells downward, some upward.  Here are the bells of St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, London, in the down position.

Bells are safest when they are down, because gravity has had its way.  Bells, given their own way, would always stay down, as these Melrose School bells in Brewster, New York are.

The English like, in everything they do, to push the intellectual limits, to make the simple complex, to make the transparent clever.  So they devised a way to get the bell all the way UP, and keep it there, as long as we like.

Here is a bell in the up position.

When a bell is “up,” it is leaning rather precariously against its balance, waiting to be asked to fall again.  Here is a whole belfry full of bells in the up position.

A bell in the “up” position is an essentially unstable thing, a very dangerous thing, because all it wants to do is go DOWN.  If you pulled the rope of a bell you thought was down and harmless, and instead it was up and ready to COME down, that bell would come crashing down uncontrolled and then — inevitably — momentum would carry it back UP, and you with it, perhaps taking off your fingers if they were stuck in the rope, or pulling your shoulder out of its socket.  We take “up” bells very seriously indeed.

Now you understand “up” and “down” bells.

Bell-ringing is entirely about control.  What the beginning ringer learns to do is to approach a “down” bell and take its long length of rope in hand, the rope made into tidy coils.  Then you start to pull your rope, and as the bell goes higher and higher toward the top of the frame, you let out the coils.  You gradually have less and less rope hanging down as the bell takes more and more of it up into the belfry, finally flying up as high as it can go, pointing its great mouth straight upward, and at the moment you stop pulling and “set” your bell at rest.

The whole process, tightly controlled, should take more than a minute.  You must put all your controlled strength into PULLING that rope, because depending on how heavy your bell is, you could be trying to pull more than a TON of weight from its happy “down” position to being 180 degrees in the opposite direction.  Bells don’t want to go up.

As I have thought of Avery growing up, from a baby until her teenage years, I now see the whole process as an attempt on my part to get her from the “down” position to “up.”  How we push them to turn over when they would just as soon lie still!  “Stand up, baby!” we urge, holding their little hands insistently when all the baby wants is to plop back down on its diapered bottom!  Then walking, chewing instead of drinking, holding a spoon, going to school, SHARING.  All the things a little child would rather not do.  They’re hard.

How I doted on all these stages!   The hours I spent driving her to ballet, to horseback riding, the endless evenings spent reading aloud from picture books, then watching her choose her own chapter books and read alone.  I got her bell “up,” in other words.  My task was blissfully clear.  I was to pull steadily, get her bell “up,” no matter how the process went against inertia.  And it worked, beautifully.

But what I’ve discovered as the mother of a teenager is that what goes up…

The bell wants to come down again, filled with all the power of gravity.  And now the job of the ringer is to help the bell come down safely, steadily.  You hardly pull at all, just enough to get the bell off the balance, and then you watch OUT!  Because those hundreds of pounds are filled with all the potential you’ve put in them, getting them up there.  You can’t let the bell fall on its own, or the rope swings wildly, smacking into the other people in the belfry, flying upwards with uncontrolled, unguided power.  It can’t control itself.  You have to learn how and when to coil the ropes to keep the bell coming down in a steady, safe way.

You see where I’m going with this.  All that pulling, all that power you’ve invested in your child — all designed to make her a happy, independent person — come back to roost.  The child WANTS to come down, swing on her own.  And you’ve got to figure out how and when to coil the ropes with just the RIGHT amount of control.  Little steps down.

It’s a fact of bell-ringing that some people prefer to ring up, some to ring down.  Some people like the challenge of getting a bell to do something against its nature, to go up, and some like the challenge of controlling a very heavy, powerful force of nature in its inevitable path.

I am a more natural ringer-up.  I like the clarity of the task, and the fact that none of it will happen without my trying really hard.  I am more intimidated by the coming-down of the bell, full of its own power.

But the fact is, you can’t be a proper ringer without being able to do BOTH.  My church rings all its bells UP at the end of a session.  They live in the “up” position.  But when I ring at Chiswick, they ring their bells DOWN at the end of a session.  I can’t pick and choose.  What my teachers tell me is that eventually, I’ll be good at both.  I might always prefer one job over the other, but I’ll be safely capable of both.  I still panic a bit, now, every time someone tells me to “ring down.”  But I can do it.

I am lucky that my particular, personal “bell” is ringing herself down really beautifully.  I am so proud of her.  I don’t always know when to step in and help control the rope and when to let gravity take its course, but I’m gradually learning.

I had a pork and pigeon terrine to start (lusciously rich, with cornichons and a dense chewy bread), and Sam a mallard and butternut squash salad.  Then my main course was a rabbit fillet wrapped around rabbit livers, in a buttery bed of carrots and Savoy cabbage, luscious.  Sam’s main course of skate and brown shrimp arrived very late and was therefore on the house!  The delay gave him a chance to share my rabbit, so all was well.  We can most definitely recommend St John: lovely friendly waitstaff and a pretty, simple white interior.  Sam came home with me for a good long gossip and John’s brilliant slow-roasted pork shoulder with a lemon-garlic-rosemary rub.  Brilliant!  And thank you as always for the photo, Avery.

John’s Slow-Roasted Pork Shoulder

(serves at least 8)

1 3-kilo pork shoulder, boned, rolled and tied

1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled

1/2 lemon, cut in two pieces

5 rosemary branches, just leaves

5 thyme branches, just leaves

sea salt and fresh black pepper, LOTS

olive oil (as necessary for proper consistency, perhaps 1/4 –1/3 cup)

Place all the marinade ingredients in a small food processor and blitz until the lemon pieces are very small and the mixture is smooth.  Rub over pork joint.  Place in a foil-lined baking dish and wrap foil around the joint to make as airtight a tent as you can.  Roast at 300F/180C for five hours.  Uncover and roast at 425F/220C for 30 minutes, then remove from oven and allow to rest for 20 minutes.  Pour off cooking juices, meanwhile, and pour through a gravy separator into a saucepan.  Whisk a bit of flour and cream into the juices and simmer to make a savoury gravy.  Carve pork in thin slices.

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Then, because it pays to have friends in high places, we spent Sunday in Oxford with our friend Jo who is a brilliant guide at the incomparable Bodleian Library.

What could be more inspiring for Avery’s university plans than to tour this 17th century landmark, where books were originally chained to lecterns and everyone studied theology.  An overwhelming sense of history, and of course most important for me, it’s where Lord Peter Wimsey filled his head with quotations.

Avery exercised her new passion: photography.  She is really gifted.

Gorgeous architecture abounded…

You couldn’t look in any direction without seeing some beautiful detail.

Finally of course, the half-term holiday was ended and real life reared its ugly head, namely at my Lost Property cupboard at school.  What belongings HAVEN’T these girls lost?

I labored cheerfully and came home to carve pumpkins with John and await Avery and her friends for a muted, teenage Halloween.  No more costumes or trick-or-treating for them, just a cozy evening together with pizza, lots of candy and a whole slate of American Halloween movies: Charlie Brown, of course, and Avery’s favorite “Castle” episodes.  I felt a little melancholy at being yet again in England on Halloween, where little dressed-up figures ringing the doorbell are few and far between.  Still, it was Halloween.

Today is a typical grey, misty London day, the first since I can remember with no guests, no plans, no parties, no exposure to public transport, no holiday atmosphere.  It’s about time, just to be quiet, to let a kitty lie heavily across my legs, to take stock of our busy lives.

And to try to remember our Parisian holiday!  It was Avery’s birthday present.  Sunday dawned with big plans.  Notre Dame!

We went especially on Sunday morning to hear the Gregorian mass, and also the bells.  I can report that the bells sounded absolutely dire, off-key, rather unpleasant and forgettable.  I was terribly disappointed until we saw a display in the church announcing their massive and expensive plans to overhaul all the bells in the winter of this year.  I looked up at the bell tower and imagined them renovated, chiming out over Paris as they did in Quasimodo’s day.

From there we crossed the picturesque Pont de l’Archeveche, narrowest of all the bridges spanning the Seine, and home to one of the peculiarly European padlock-love displays.  Avery just adores these, first seen in Rome, then Venice, then Florence.  Now Paris takes its place in Avery’s visual memory.

We hopped into a taxi and sped to the Boulevard Raspail to visit the famous biologique, organic, food market.  We queued for the famous fried potato-cheese galettes, well deserving of their reputation!

Hot, savoury and delicious, they gave us enough energy to peruse the long market offering every foodstuff you can imagine.  I found it quite intimidating!  But beautiful and tempting.

I eventually made a decision and bought a joint of freshly-rotisseried crackly pork, plus these tomatoes, a bag of spicy roquette, and two enormous artichauts, like exotic flowers when I prepared them!

We reluctantly (well, I) left the market and we walked to my beloved Musee Rodin, in whose shabby and brilliant archives I camped out for months and months 20 years ago, doing my research.  There we fulfilled a Facebook plan that warmed my heart: I met beautiful Lindsay, the daughter of my singing teacher in Indianapolis when I was Avery’s age!

How unbelievable to be with the new generation, smack in the middle between me and my daughter, and she looks just like her mother!  I felt overwhelmingly nostalgic, for the wonderful hours spent singing as Lindsay’s mother taught me the ins and outs of technique, 30 years ago.

We toured the gardens and the house.  Avery took brilliant images of the sculptures so dear to my heart.

And before you get depressed (as we did) at the peeling paint, scarred marble steps and creaking floorboards, I must assure you that the Musee is undergoing a massive renovation this winter, as well as the Notre Dame bells!  It is an idea whose time has come.  But go now, before they close for their repairs.

We sauntered out into the sunshine to find lunch.  Sadly our destination, Cafe Max (another haunt of my years in Paris) was closed.  So we ended up at a rather quixotic and bizarre restaurant, Home in Paris.  A massive buffet!  Typical brunch items like creamy scrambled eggs, sausages and bacon, plus salmon and sole en brochette, on barbecue sticks, and tiny steak Tartares topped with quail’s eggs!  Grilled aubergines, peppers and courgettes, fine beans… and hard-boiled eggs stuffed with — are you sitting down? — truffled mayonnaise!   And the desserts… Avery was in heaven.

“Have you noticed?” I asked.  “Everyone here but us is FRENCH.”  It turns out the restaurant is quite a destination for the locals — so simple to bring your mother who eats only vegetables, your child who eats none, your teenage son who eats everything and can never get enough!  Lovely.

We staggered off down the avenue de la Motte Piquet, walking and walking and walking until we reached…

Nothing prepares you for the sheer SCALE and magnificent design of the gorgeous Tour Eiffel.

Then we hopped onto a tour bateau and spent a stuffy half-hour inside, drifting down the Seine, until we came to our senses and stood outside by the rail.  The Hotel de Ville, the Musee d’Orsay (closed for a strike!), the Jardins des Plantes, all passed by.  We were just happy to be together.

Home on feet that could barely function, we were so tired!  And then, Monday in Montmartre.

One of only two original Metro station entrances left in Paris!  But beware: there are over 100 steps up from the train!  Puffing and panting, we headed toward lunch at the cafe made famous by the film “Amelie,” Les Deux Moulins.  Steak tartare, Avery’s beloved croque monsieur, feeling like total tourists!  Ah well, why not.

And up, up, UP to Sacre Coeur!  Avery’s photo, of course.  She has such an eye!

Avery looked through the telescope also made famous by Amelie, and we were all unfairly annoyed that the Eiffel Tower could not be seen!

I was terribly disappointed to find that the famous fruit and veg shop in the film was closed!

I hope this aberration was merely a matter of its being a Monday?  Still, it was a long uphill walk for a closed shop.

We came home for a brief toes-up and then headed out for a bit of last-minute shopping, finding the perfect cape for Avery’s winter coat.  And collapse!

Finally, our last morning in Paris.  I awoke feeling rather ill, probably the result of too much pate and cheese and total exhaustion, and was tempted to slip back into bed and recover before our trip home.  “But we really want to see the Oscar Wilde tomb in the Cimitiere de Pere-Lachaise,” John reminded me, and we really did.  So off we went, picking up a lovely little chyrsanthemum plant to give to dear Oscar, and trooping gamely through the cemetery in search of our goal.

“Look up ahead!” I said, laughing.  “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if, after all this, that construction site were…”

And it was.  Poor Oscar.  Poor us!

We groaned!  “I don’t believe it!  The ONLY grave in the entire cemetery under wraps, and it’s Oscar’s.”  Avery left a traditional tribute, anyway.

Ah well, at least we found him.  And dear Chopin!

Fred?  Really?  That seems a little familiar.

We had to admit, then, that it was time to go home.  A quick lunch at our beloved apartment (thank you, Kathleen and Joe!), packing and cleaning, and to the Eurostar, where I bought several brilliant little mustards in duty-free, Avery milled around the makeup counters, I picked up a Paris Match with the first photographs of the little Sarkozy daughter, and we came home.

What glorious adventures.  Overwhelming, really, bringing together memories of the past, the joy of showing our child a lovely time, the drama of appreciating one of the world’s greatest cities.  Happy Birthday, Avery!

There is no way to convey the magic of Paris in photos, or words.  Even the simplest things are rather other worldly, like this view from our rented apartment, near to the Louvre.

It’s tempting to try to describe the extraordinary charms of everything about Paris: the architectural details around every corner, the charming blue street signs, the stylish girls and boys on mind-bogglingly speedy scooters, the perfectly fashionable small French children speaking in high piping voices, “Papa!  Maman!  Je voudrais du pain au chocolat!”  Even the florist displays have a foreign, glossy poetry.

We arrived in the early afternoon, dropped off our bags at the lovely apartment with its spiral staircase.

And there began the pattern of our holiday in Paris, each of us going along with the passions of the others!  We walked and walked and walked, first passing an unexpected landmark in my life — Dehillerin, the world-famous kitchen supply shop, made famous by Julia Child in her memoirs.

No photographs were allowed inside, so I cannot show you the unbelievable sight of an entire WALL of wire whisks!  Hundreds of choices!  Every sort of cast-iron and copper and porcelain implement you can imagine, rows upon rows of knife sets, fish molds, madeleine trays, brightly-colored cutting boards, stock pots of every size in the world.  Heaven.  I didn’t buy anything, though.  Self-denial is my motto, as you know.

From there we happened upon a very satisfying vintage clothing shop called “Hippy Market,” where Avery tried on thousands of garments, looking especially for a new winter coat.  If only her arms were shorter.

She did succumb, however, to this evocative and adorable pair of Converse sneakers upon which some past owner had written the words for “love” in many languages, including Russian!

From there we trooped toward the Pompidou Centre, passing along the way this incredible art installation.  A wall of words, quite simply.

The general message of the wall is a sort of pan-modern support of peace, greenness, tolerance and love.  Quite beautiful, as Avery’s detailed photo shows (she is becoming a more gifted photographer all the time).

We arrived at the Pompidou and Avery and John decided to take a break, sit on a wall and take photos of the new Converse.  So it was but the work of a moment for me to cross the square to “DOD,” or “Dish of the Day,” one of the most charming and delicious delicatessens you will ever encounter.  I cannot seem to find a reference to this place on the web, but trust me, it’s opposite the entrance to the Pompidou.  Fresh breads, fruit and veg, wine, prepared foods, salads, and cheeses.  Oh, les fromages francaises!  I could not resist this darling packet of three different laits, milks, with its label, “Would you know which is which?  Sheep, goat and ewe.”

I also could not begin to resist two different sorts of rillettes, which are terrines of shredded preserved meats, confit in fact, suspended in… fat.  I bought goose, AND duck.  Spread on a piece of baguette… heaven!

We put aside our acquisitiveness and went into the Pompidou, marvelling at the views from the glass escalators.  Memories of my long-ago days doing dissertation research came back to me, twenty years ago, a student, alone.  So much happier to wander through the museum with my darling family!  We each chose our favorite pieces.  Avery really liked the conceptual installations of Fluxus artist George Brecht.

John absolutely fell in love with a brilliant Japanese installation of a length of cassette tape being perpetually blown in a waving oval by an overhead fan!  Silly me not to write down the name of the artist…

I myself fell desperately in love with a text installation — always text with me! — of metallic words, telling a story of two men in a bar, suspended around three of the four walls of one room.  Again, I stupidly did not take any notes of the artist!  I welcome any intelligence from anyone who finds herself at the Pompidou any time soon.

I find it very intriguing that all three of us eschewed traditional painting, drawing or sculpture, even photography was pushed aside in our enthusiasm for irony, humor and a deceptive simplicity, in these installations.

Having slaked John’s thirst for architecture and salved our cultural consciences, we turned to the more mundane subject of what on earth to eat for dinner, and where to buy the ingredients!  And here we came upon a slight disadvantage of taking an apartment in a very popular tourist area: while there is every cafe under the sun, finding fresh ingredients is rather more difficult.  But finally we came upon Supermarche G20 in the rue Etienne Marcel.  And here John uttered one of the sentences we collect in our game, “I don’t think anyone has ever said this before.”

“Kristen, stop fondling the kumquats.”

But who can resist their dimpled skin?  I didn’t buy any, however, restricting myself to ingredients I actually needed for dinner, since we had to carry it all home.  We decided upon a dish of veal sauteed with mushrooms and garlic, the sauce finished with brandy and creme fraiche.  Heavenly.  Home laden, feet aching, all of us completely worn out, but reviving enough after dinner to go out for a little explore in darkness.

We came upon this menu, at the fantastic — and I mean that literally, surely it is a fantasy — Restaurant Le Grand Vefour.

Could any menu priced at 282 Euros — about $380 — possibly be described as “a pleasure menu”?  We were gobsmacked.  What on earth were they serving?  Avery succinctly said, “It would be like eating coins.”  We enlarged upon this theme, imagining our conversation with the garcon.  “Yes, could I have my change in notes, please?  These coins are SO hard to chew.”

Up in the morning completely refreshed to venture out of the apartment, finding that Saturdays in our neighborhood are VERY quiet indeed.  “The people must really respect weekends here,” John observed, with some wishful thinking, remembering the seven-day work weeks of his career.  Look what interesting graffiti we came upon at a building site.

We all wondered if the sentiments expressed here are approval, or disapproval?

We sauntered toward the shopping street of the rue de Rivoli in order to further our search for Avery’s coat, wandering into Zara, no luck there, then sending Avery off down the enormous escalier roulant, escalator, into the depths of Sephora, her beloved cosmetics shop.  Her capacity to shop there always amazes her parents, as we cannot understand how she can look in one more city at another set of shelves containing makeup!  But it’s just as I am with cheese and bread, and John with the windows of estate agents!

John and I couldn’t quite take 45 minutes in Avery’s mecca, however, so we agreed to meet later and meandered toward the river, for a spot of sightseeing.  And there, poor John, I came upon a French… pet store.  Just look at the chatons, the precious French kittens for sale.  And I mean SALE.  These kittens were expensive, coming in at 820 Euros each!

Poor John.  We had to go back with Avery, and thereupon for the rest of the day she and I imagined all the other purchases we would give up in order to have a Parisian kitten.

It was time for lunch, and we found ourselves outside the gorgeous soaring Cafe Marly at the Louvre where we had seen people dining in luxury the night before.  “Let’s just do it,” we all decided rashly (after all, it would take a lot of declined lunches to buy a kitten).  And there we were, seated in the sun outside, with gorgeous views of I.M. Pei’s glass dome.  It was a total DELIGHT.  Just look at my Salade Nicoise, Version 2011, with a mysterious sauce made of whipped tuna, avocado and creme fraiche.

Avery ate every snippet of her classic Croque Monsieur, a completely delicious toasted ham and cheese sandwich.  If you want an egg added, ask for a Croque Madame!

It was hard to get up and agree to walk again!

But off we went, to the Jeu de Paume for the Diane Arbus show.

And it was WELL worth the walk, the enormously long queue.  Her photographs are simply divinely evocative, troubling, unique.

This show led to very provocative discussions about, for one thing, how important is it to know the life story of the artist — or any details about the creator whatsoever — before you see the work?  Avery’s considered opinion, and I agree, is that knowledge of the artist’s wishes, intentions, biographical details CAN add to our appreciation of artwork which without that knowledge might be mere pictures.  But there can be an over-reliance on such details (certainly many theorists want to call them “extraneous”) that can cloud our immediate reaction to artwork.  I must admit that when we came to the end of the show, and read the timeline of her life — interestingly at the END of the show, not the beginning! — that she committed suicide… I was not surprised.  An awe-inspiring collection of images, and what a life.

And so from there home, stopping to buy ingredients for Avery’s beloved “Steak frites.”  What a joy to cook at “home.”  And to collapse once more, to refresh ourselves in sleep… and onto Day Three in the morning!