spe­cial cel­e­bra­tion: 500th Post!

Good­ness.

Real­ly, the mile­stone leaves me slight­ly breath­less. Five hun­dred posts! The aver­age about 2000 words per post? You do the math. Pret­ty stag­ger­ing. I reck­on about 1/2% of my death­less prose is actu­al­ly death­less, but even on those odds there are a fair num­ber of words here that I care an awful lot about, and I want to thank each and every one of you for the appre­cia­tive and so often respon­sive read­ing you’ve giv­en them all.

Mem­o­rable among them are my ear­ly record­ings of bewil­dered times in our adopt­ed home­land, glo­ri­ous mem­o­ries of long-ago trips to for­eign lands, deep delv­ings into my culi­nary past, love­ly moments from Avery’s child­hood here. There have been moments of unbear­able sad­ness, although you learn to bear them, moments of great pas­sion that lurk under the sur­face but do not, any­more than the great tragedy, make it to the blog­ging page. There have been great reunions and small coun­try adven­tures, sum­mer adven­tures with friends and fam­i­ly back in America.

Most of all, the blog has pro­vid­ed me with a way to appre­ci­ate life three times: once in the liv­ing, once in the telling (all right, all right, I some­times embell­ish!) and once more in the read­ing of the telling. This last is, I admit, a total­ly guilty plea­sure: what did my life look like in the telling? Not always the way it looked like in the liv­ing. Hap­pi­er, fun­nier, more intense. But always entertaining.

Anoth­er guilty con­fes­sion. I just downed a tiny slice of Avery’s break­fast lemon driz­zle cake and… it did not suck. The child is lucky. At least some days.

Just look at the archi­tec­tur­al and hor­ti­cul­tur­al glo­ry of our adven­ture, the last few days. The house itself, hid­den in deep­est Here­ford, has a name, but unlike our maid­en food writ­ing voy­age at the Devon house called Totleigh, the name this time nev­er plant­ed a seed with me. I don’t know what I will end up call­ing it in my secret heart, but I think it’s some­thing dull like “the reunion house.” Which will work, as far as nomen­cla­ture, until we have our next reunion, which we hope will be very, very soon. The mag­ic of the set­ting was in part due to the house­’s art­less, unself­con­scious charm, set as it was in a gar­den of tru­ly artis­tic achieve­ment. We all feared that with the rein­car­na­tion of the house as a hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion, the gar­den would return to its old wild­ness, and fair enough. Not being a gar­den­er myself, I always feel a con­cil­ia­to­ry pull towards the wilder­ness: let her have her plants and her acres back to her­self. But frankly, let me har­vest the aspara­gus FIRST.

Fri­day after­noon found me rac­ing toward Padding­ton with John because I told him we were leav­ing from King’s Cross. MAJOR pan­ic. Halfway there, I res­ur­rect the train sheet from my bag. “Oh, nev­er mind, it’s Padding­ton,” I said air­i­ly, tak­ing a full ten min­utes off his life, poor man. He was not sor­ry to let me down, and I found my train and my book and prompt­ly spent the next hour and some reliv­ing our old Octo­ber adven­tures and ful­ly plan­ning to top them, full stop, in the next four days. This was eas­i­ly achieved by the first glo­ri­ous encounter of the week­end: Rosie at the Bath train sta­tion to col­lect me for the jour­ney. Her impos­si­bly snap­ping blue eyes, root of all fun and mis­chief, her bound­less hug, and most impor­tant, her huge Land Rover, although, dear read­ers, I may tell you that I am glad I did not bring a kit­ten with me because there was NO ROOM. Exot­ic lemons, chilli pep­pers, bison grass vod­ka, liv­ing basil plants and gar­dens of let­tuce, cheeses and breads, whisky and wine, I can­not list it all.

To this I added my beloved Richard Cor­ri­g­an Crab Tart (although dis­ap­point­ing­ly, I was not able to con­vert one sin­gle of my com­pa­ny all week­end to Richard’s charms, oth­er than as a cook: my crush went unshared), my cool bag of Gig­gly Pig bacons and sausages, my can­nelli­ni bean sal­ad, my Smirnoff and Arma­gnac. We set off and found, after some impos­si­bly com­plex traf­fic nego­ti­a­tions and much fran­tic con­ver­sa­tion, Sam. Dear, dear Sam, such a unique com­bi­na­tion of youth and wis­dom. I say unique, and yet he shared his moment of glo­ry over the week­end with a very dif­fer­ent and yet equal­ly charm­ing young man, Adam. How are very young men these days so WISE? Pos­i­tive­ly dis­pens­ing wis­dom, which we old­er ladies were only too glad to absorb. Of course it could be their undoubt­ed phys­i­cal glo­ries as well! But I digress.

Our jour­ney was punc­tu­at­ed by ridicu­lous laugh­ter, mem­o­ries of our orig­i­nal adven­tures in Octo­ber, Sam’s sto­ries of his teach­ing jobs, Rosie’s of her film for­ays, mine of, sad­ly, Lost Prop­er­ty, and such mun­dane occu­pa­tions. Then we arrived in a gath­er­ing misty twi­light to find our com­pa­tri­ots, wine glass­es in hand, grin­ning absurd­ly, we pil­ing out of the car in aban­don, many kiss­es and hugs. These friends who I remem­ber with vary­ing degrees of famil­iar­i­ty and affec­tion, made so much more real over the inter­ven­ing months by the mag­ic of email, set before me again like peo­ple in a doll­house, yet unde­ni­ably flesh­ly and real.

That first night was a com­bi­na­tion of stim­u­la­tion, cozi­ness, the promise of excite­ment to come and the relax­ation of friends. Rosie’s car­rot, pinenut (why does that word make me laugh so now, I can­not say) tart with turmer­ic and ground almonds, along­side my crab and goats cheese offer­ing, glo­ri­ous sal­ads and cheeses, fine wines and loads of laugh­ter… We stayed up far too late, which was the watch­word for the hol­i­day. And Sat­ur­day offered more delights…