For Gareth and me it’s an extension of the torpor we’d ( I, anyway) got accustomed to at the caravan except we are now comfortably ensconced in our Legoland-type house. In November our tenant left in time for us to pack up at the caravan, get our stuff from storage and move in.
As I write, it’s the early hours and I am on watch for the arrival of puppies as Gareth takes his turn for an an hour or two’s sleep. Knowing that we wouldn’t be travelling this winter we decided to let our Pwdin have a litter before she gets older. As a mother I am relating to her as her body prepares to bring new life into the world and Gareth is like an anxious father as he diligently checks her and studies whelping articles. We are equipped and prepared but at this moment, Pwdin seems a bit reluctant to produce. Our preoccupation with her is a welcome distraction from the fact of being separated from family and friends. We had a lovely reprieve by having Christmas Day at Owen and Jess’s; a sparkly day shining brightly in my memory like a star in what would otherwise be a gloomy winter. Contact with the rest of my brood is virtual and scarce.
In my last blog I admitted to my spectacular lack of achievement through the autumn. Apart from our period of home-making I can’t thrill you with any novel accomplishments. I have enjoyed the thinking time, however, with plenty of opportunity to ruminate on the meaning of life. I can’t offer you any stupendous revelations but I will share a couple of my thoughts (they aren’t necessarily my own thoughts, of course - I have been reading a bit).
For instance, back in the summer we picked up on a podcast that intrigued me into buying the book it was based on, “Sitopia - how food can save the world” by Carolyn Steel. The podcast was a vision of society, post-pandemic, that realised the significance and value of food after issues of supply and distribution (we’re now witnessing those issues as a result of Brexit, too, as it happens). The book skilfully presents the idea of how we need to rethink our attitudes to food given the way our monetary economy has, after 5000 years, got us up a creek without a paddle.
The book is giving me pause to think, as I often do, about the ‘olds’ that have passed on, so recently it feels; my parents, Gareth’s parents and two very dear aunts, my god-mothers. I am glad that they didn’t suffer the same fate as so many of their generation in this pandemic, though they lived through WW2 and came through many a crisis, personal and societal. The book has caused me to think of how food featured in their lives and to what extent their lives were shaped by the foods available to them. Although I was too young to remember, I had my own ration book as a baby, food shortages still being a problem in the early fifties, but I do remember some of the tales my parents told about what foods were available to them through the war, and how precious something like an orange was, or a piece of chocolate. My father’s recollections of fresh milk at the mid-Wales farm he was evacuated to, left him with a life-long love of a cool glass of milk. My mother, my sisters and I developed a finely tuned ear for when Dad had sneaked a swig from the fridge. Much to his bemusement we could even tell from his voice if he’d ‘been at the milk’.
It may have been the lack of anything food-wise to get excited about in my mother’s youth that led to her being a less-than-adept cook. Like most housewives in the fifties (yes, it was a woman’s job then) my mother fell in with the trend in convenience food and as children a large part of my sisters’ and my diet was tinned or dried and rehydrated. My father liked his meat very well done which is just as well because that’s the only way my mother could cook it - burnt.
Gareth’s parents both grew up in rural Gower, in the same corner of the peninsular, the war being a bit less apparent perhaps than it was to my Swansea town-dwelling parents. Gareth’s mother was from farming people and farm life, with its food-based economy and close community ties. It definitely shaped her to the effect of her being unable to adapt happily to the life-on-an-estate that marriage took her to. Raised on a hard-work ethic, in retirement she had to make work for herself, including for her retired teacher husband whose preference was for more cerebral things than manual labour. With no fields or flocks to attend to the only labour available to her was cleaning and cooking, with knitting for leisure. Food played a deeply important role in Val’s life, central to her need to nurture relationships and cement her place in the community.
Many of us today are finding meal preparation a pleasant distraction from the sense of incarceration inflicted on us by this pandemic. With restaurants closed, home cooking is having a resurgence. My own cooking is definitely not Masterchef worthy, but I am enjoying the kitchen in our Lego house (Taylor Wimpey actually) having managed in our caravan kitchen or the motorhome for the past three years. It’s nice to have our stuff around us again too. Christmas surprises for us consisted of rediscovering things that have been packed away in storage since moving from Bay View. Rediscovering my cookery books has been fun. I’ve been able to whip up some of the old favourites with the book propped up in the kitchen instead of having to work my way through someone else’s blog on my iPad to follow an untried recipe. You’ll have to ask Gareth about the worth of my concoctions.
Post-script: I wrote the above just after the New Year came in, as we waited for Pwdin to deliver her babies. On January 5th she produced four pups; two males and two females. They are now one and a half weeks old and more than twice their birth weight. Pwdin has taken to motherhood beautifully and Bess is looking on carefully, looking forward (I assume) to being a playful aunty. Their eyes will start opening soon and once they start running around it’s going to be very busy here (that reminds me - I need to get a new mop and bucket). It will be fun, but tinged with the disappointment of not having the grandchildren around to see the process. Children are so detached from the natural world these days, compared with previous generations, and this pandemic is cutting them off from so many other things, now, too.
Ok, 2021, do your worst, but get it over with so we can gather and hug again.
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