Washing away the old year, gorging on the new: Bathtubs and potatoes

First, as the old year ends, the bad: A few words on British bathtubs. Yes, a rant.

***

I have never seen such a collection of useless items for cleansing the body in my life. How hard should it be to design a bathtub? All that’s required is a deep porcelain-clad metal or acrylic tub about five feet long (or longer), two feet wide and maybe 20 inches deep, plus an exit for the water and some means of filling it, i.e., faucets and a tap. (I could wax eloquent on taps, and might yet some other time, but this is about tubs.)

Last summer, about a month before deciding to sell our flat and buy a house, we had a new bathroom installed. I pored over the plumbing catalogs until I found a bathtub that was both long and wide and had very few tricky bits. In short, one could get into it, sit in it, the water would slosh around one’s body and one could then attend to washing all parts of said body without undue contortions. I did note, a week or so after buying it, that the back edge was rolled a bit, like a hard acrylic pillow. However, to thus recline would mean one’s hips were shoved to the narrowest place in the tub, making for two mini-lakes of water.

Huh? What do you mean, you might well ask, the narrowest place in the tub? Isn’t a tub sort of like this?

All the curvy parts are on the outside. The walls are straight, and it's as wide at the top as the bottom, at the front as the back. Bliss!

Only in America.

Butt-squisher bathtubs
In England (and Ireland, as I rediscovered many times over many, many years), tubs are sculpted not to fit the human body or even to leave it well enough alone as US tubs do, but to fit some cockamamie idea of the designer.

See the little curvy shelf on the left. Note how narrow it gets at the bottom. And this is a fairly plain British bath.

Why, one might wonder, should a bathtub be kidney-shaped, like Liberace’s pool?

Beats heck out of me. Even the extra-long tub in the house we are renting until our new one is built is shapey. It has nifty little dolphin shaped indents extending down the sides so that, in places, the tub is narrower at the top than on the bottom.  Oy vay!

However, wet is wet, and I’ve adapted. Still, I spent this afternoon looking for US tub imports on the Internet, because I’m fairly certain that the first change we will make in the new house is to switch out the builder’s tub in my bathroom (Simon’s only has a shower anyway) for something that does what a tub should do: Fill with water, sit there without molesting the bather, and empty when finished.

American Standard, my dream bath

I’d like one like the first one above―an American Standard―if I can find it. Or import it. Or does anyone want to bring it to me as checked luggage? Don't care much for the beige; please bring me one in plain white.

Never too many potatoes!

Now, as the new year begins, the good. A few words about British roasted potatoes. Yes, a love song.

I have never seen so many different kinds of potatoes in my life. And, since my husband’s middle initial is P (which I say stands for Potato, but he thinks stands for Piers), potatoes are important.

For example, tonight I’m making roasted King Edward potatoes. These are floury, and particularly good for British roast potatoes. First one peels them, then parboils them, then beats them up a bit by shaking them, drained, in the pot. Then one rolls them around in lovely duck fat already melted on the bottom of a baking tray and roasts them in a medium oven for 50-60 minutes. When they’re done, the roughened up outsides are delightfully crunchy, while the inside is delightfully mellow. (Sound effect: Lips smacking)

Notice that these potatoes are cooked in duck fat, which one can buy easily in any supermarket in England, unless one truly prefers chicken or goose fat which are also available.

Delicious, duck-fat potatoes

These are NOT American-style “oven-fried in hardly any light oil” potatoes. No, ma’am. These are delicious potatoes. Irresistible potatoes. Potatoes to make Weight Watchers® weep.

Which sort of brings me back to the bathtub thing. Why―in a nation so dedicated to the true miracle of roasted potatoes in duck fat―would they design tubs that are narrow where one sits and narrower at the bottom than the top, overall? I mean, isn’t that sort of trying to pack ten pounds of potatoes into a five-pound bag?

Happy New Year!

Winter mists in Cornwall, a Christmas gift with no equal

The term winter wonderland always makes me chuckle. A few days ago, my sister-in-law used it, as it was meant to be used, in imitation of my late mother whose innocent delight in life was almost comical sometimes, especially to her jaded and oh-so-sophisticated offspring. (Hey, all kids are like that.) But her innocence was also quite disarming, and even in her most banal expressions of the deep way in which she actually experienced beauty, there was truth.

So it was, as my husband and I drove a mere 20 miles on a pre-Christmas, post-snowfall errand in Southwest England, that the words winter wonderland popped into my head. The landscape, through some deep woods with their straight tall trees reaching up from the Cornish slopes, was coated not in snow, and not in ice as so often in the mid-Atlantic US, but with frost. It was like hoarfrost gone mad, hoarfrost given leave to create an alien world so beautiful, one could almost imagine crystalline creatures living there, keeping warm in the deep inner green of the frosted fir trees, flitting happily from one ivy leaf to another, landing lightly between the frosted edges of the leaves to dance on the still warm greensward.

The Queen Anne’s Lace stood erect and singular on the verges. Its lacy head of tiny flowers grouped as if an embroiderer had created them with so many French knots stood still and blue-white on the delicate stalks that hold the floral abundance to the single, sturdy stalk.  

Gnarled trees, old and wise, stood fieldward behind frost-gray hedgerows, separating one herd of sheep from another. White-blue, leafless limbs twined against a gun-metal sky, a sky with tinges of pink hope skipping at the horizon, or parting clouds higher up to announce that tomorrow―maybe tomorrow―there would be full sun. Maybe tomorrow all the inconveniences and danger, and beauty, of the snowfalls, melted into a much more mundane form, would be on their way to the sea, down gullies and roadways and soaking into farmland to emerge again as part of a wheat stalk, or soaked into the earth to be given up at a holy well by and by.

The Gulf Stream, hugging the Cornish coast, made mist of the melting snow from the eastern storm, arriving for several days running from its birthplace in Mother Russia. The mist, when the sun dropped early below the hilly horizon, froze the mist in place. Thus were there no breaks in the blue-white foliage patina, as with fallen snow falling off again and going to ground. Thus was there no glissade of almost-water as there is following an ice storm. There was only silent, constant, even frosting on the entire woodsy landscape. Frosting on limbs and branches, on the bark of trunks, on every edge of every living ivy leaf climbing the trees, evergreen like the frosted firs standing, holding birds within their soft branches, inside where the mist and frost did not penetrate. There was a depth in the landscape, a welcoming heart, announced by a fragile beauty seen few places on earth.

There’s no more. That’s my Christmas gift to you, if you’re reading this. It’s my Christmas gift to my intensely missed mother, whose delight in the beauties of today would take my breath away as surely as the scene itself.

But wait. There’s one more gift, a photo by my friend Rachel Burch, landscape photographer, who tramped the moors today to see what it was like on the windswept side of Dartmoor, where snow remains, mists are banished, and sheep do exactly what sheep do, gathering together because they are sheep, and heedless that some of us use the word that names them as an insult to other humans. On Dartmoor, to be a sheep in winter is to be safe, an excellent thing, and as beautiful as any creature on earth can be.

Photo by Rachel Burch

Mission Impossible: Feminine Hygiene in England

Remember when your mother came at you with one of these? (Wiki commons)

I didn’t expect feminine hygiene products in England to be quite as prevalent, nor as good, as they are in France.

On the other hand, I didn’t expect to spend a solid year trying to obtain ― and failing to obtain ― such a simple, useful item as a twin-pak of Massengill Vaginal Cleansing Powder or premixed bottles.  Massengill  is, after all, nothing more than powdered vinegar. But I failed to find anything of the sort. Indeed, one website for which I had high hopes advertised that Massengill might just be available from them without a prescription. What? For powdered vinegar?

Prescription meds from the kitchen cupboard

Apparently, the Brits think vinegar is a prescription drug.

So then I thought I’d just buy some apple cider vinegar (thinking even white balsamic would be a little too trendy for the purpose intended) and mix up some of my own cleanser and apply it with something else very common in France ― and even the prude-heavy United States ― a simple, squeezable bottle with a long neck that is meant for internal feminine cleansing.

Nope. I spent a full hour looking for such a thing on the internet and finally came up with one…for about 15 pounds, which translates to somewhere around 25 bucks. In the U.S., such a thing ― if anyone wanted it rather than disposable bottles of Massengill or Massengill clones ― would be about five bucks.

However, if I wanted anal cleansing, that’s another matter entirely. I could get bottles with ribbed nozzles, nozzles with little spiky things on them, whirling nozzles…in short, any kind of anal cleaning bottle I wanted.

Mind you, we are not talking about enemas here. I know about enemas. Everyone who grew up in the 1950s knows about enemas. And we would have moved ― any and all of us ― to the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War, to avoid them. Alas, a touch of tummy trouble and out would come the fearsome bag, with that menacing look on Mom’s face.  It really doesn’t bear thinking about. Oh the pain, oh the shame.

Enemas: Fascinating subject to Brits

But in England, they advertise the features of enema equipment in fascinating detail. Enema equipment comes in bottles of 8 ounces or so capacity. Also available are one-gallon bags. And five-freaking-gallon bags. (Whew!  So glad my mother didn’t have one of those!) There are, on offer, enema bags meant to be used in the shower. In the shower?  Oy, vay. Remind me to check for hanging rubberized equipment in any bathroom in a house where I’m a guest before I take a shower, especially if it isn’t a separate shower, but a shower/bath.

So that’s life in England. A fascination with cleansing products and equipment for the posterior aperture of male or female, and an almost studious ignorance of the need― heaven forbid the desire―to cleanse the interior of the front of the female anatomy, and a concomitant almost total lack of equipment and potions with which to do the job. 

Massengill connection
My husband even suggested that I call my best friend in Maryland, have her go buy a Massengill twin-pak, empty it, and mail me the resulting two cunning little bottles and nozzles, capable of being filled at home with a vinegar-water mixture quite a few times before they’d probably become too wimpy to use. For mailing, emptying them would be cheaper than sending them complete. And lord knows what kind of trouble we would get into with Homeland Security if the things leaked and some gawky doofus with more authority than brains found them leaking in transit.

Today, however, I decided to take the plunge I thought might bring me success in my quest for cleanliness. I braved the x-rated UK sites that advertised various equipment for enhancing what we shall circumspectly refer to as relationships, and voila!  I located a bottle and nozzle via mail order for a reasonable price. The nozzle is smooth, has a few holes for the mixture to exit into the place intended, and it doesn’t twirl or tickle.

Now my only problem is wondering what the deliverer of the Royal Mail will assume goes on in our little house behind the big fences and hedges.

Feminine Hygiene in England: Mission Impossible

Remember when your mother came at you with one of these? (Wiki Commons)

I didn’t expect feminine hygiene products in England to be quite as prevalent, nor as good, as they are in France.

On the other hand, I didn’t expect to spend a solid year trying to obtain ― and failing to obtain ― such a simple, useful item as a twin-pak of Massengill Vaginal Cleansing Powder or premixed bottles.  Massengill  is, after all, nothing more than powdered vinegar. But I failed to find anything of the sort. Indeed, one website for which I had high hopes advertised that Massengill might just be available from them without a prescription. What? For powdered vinegar?

Prescription meds from the kitchen cupboard

Apparently, the Brits think vinegar is a prescription drug.

So then I thought I’d just buy some apple cider vinegar (thinking even white balsamic would be a little too trendy for the purpose intended) and mix up some of my own cleanser and apply it with something else very common in France ― and even the prude-heavy United States ― a simple, squeezable bottle with a long neck that is meant for internal feminine cleansing.

Nope. I spent a full hour looking for such a thing on the internet and finally came up with one…for about 15 pounds, which translates to somewhere around 25 bucks. In the U.S., such a thing ― if anyone wanted it rather than disposable bottles of Massengill or Massengill clones ― would be about five bucks.

However, if I wanted anal cleansing, that’s another matter entirely. I could get bottles with ribbed nozzles, nozzles with little spiky things on them, whirling nozzles…in short, any kind of anal cleaning bottle I wanted.

Mind you, we are not talking about enemas here. I know about enemas. Everyone who grew up in the 1950s knows about enemas. And we would have moved ― any and all of us ― to the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War, to avoid them. Alas, a touch of tummy trouble and out would come the fearsome bag, with that menacing look on Mom’s face.  It really doesn’t bear thinking about. Oh the pain, oh the shame.

Enemas: Fascinating subject to Brits

But in England, they advertise the features of enema equipment in fascinating detail. Enema equipment comes in bottles of 8 ounces or so capacity. Also available are one-gallon bags. And five-freaking-gallon bags. (Whew!  So glad my mother didn’t have one of those!) There are, on offer, enema bags meant to be used in the shower. In the shower?  Oy, vay. Remind me to check for hanging rubberized equipment in any bathroom in a house where I’m a guest before I take a shower, especially if it isn’t a separate shower, but a shower/bath.

So that’s life in England. A fascination with cleansing products and equipment for the posterior aperture of male or female, and an almost studious ignorance of the need― heaven forbid the desire―to cleanse the interior of the front of the female anatomy, and a concomitant almost total lack of equipment and potions with which to do the job. 

Massengill connection
My husband even suggested that I call my best friend in Maryland, have her go buy a Massengill twin-pak, empty it, and mail me the resulting two cunning little bottles and nozzles, capable of being filled at home with a vinegar-water mixture quite a few times before they’d probably become too wimpy to use. For mailing, emptying them would be cheaper than sending them complete. And lord knows what kind of trouble we would get into with Homeland Security if the things leaked and some gawky doofus with more authority than brains found them leaking in transit.

Today, however, I decided to take the plunge I thought might bring me success in my quest for cleanliness. I braved the x-rated UK sites that advertised various equipment for enhancing what we shall circumspectly refer to as relationships, and voila!  I located a bottle and nozzle via mail order for a reasonable price. The nozzle is smooth, has a few holes for the mixture to exit into the place intended, and it doesn’t twirl or tickle.

Now my only problem is wondering what the deliverer of the Royal Mail will assume goes on in our little house behind the big fences and hedges.

An early Auld Lang Syne...and some good music for pre-Christmas

Peter, Paul and Mary at the Westbury Music Fair, 2006 (Wiki Commons)

I could easily wonder why memories are coming to me thick and fast just now, unaccountably at the start of the Christmas season. Auld lang syne is more than three weeks off; first there is the giving and the getting to get through. Still…

Perhaps it is serendipity, running down the YouTubes some of my friends post on Facebook, and taking side trips allied to what they’ve posted. Maybe that’s how I got to Peter, Paul & Mary singing The Rising of the Moon on the BBC in 1966.

PP&M gave the first really big concert I had ever seen. It was in October 1965, at the Westbury Music Fair, right before I left for college. (Oddly enough, our fall semester began about October 28, some weird arrangement with the Ford Foundation so that people could attend three full semesters a year and finish a four-year degree in under three years if they wanted to. I didn’t want to. I wanted to whole college experience. What I got, of course, since our spring semester ended mid-June after everyone else had been home for a month, was a hell of a time finding a summer job. But I digress.)

Anyway, to bring it all back to Christmas, the first or second year I was living in Bristol, Tennessee (as totally unaccountable as anything in a long and unaccountable life), I saw a TV special listed in TV Guide that I could actually receive with the rabbit ears on my TV. I was too broke to spring for cable. The program was on PBS, and it was Peter, Paul & Mary, a whole hour of them singing Christmas songs.

It was magical.  I had no reason to get anything like the warm fuzzies at that time in my life, but that program entranced me, and gave me a kick start I probably badly needed to feel the least bit festive. I was hundreds of miles from people I loved―my mother, stepfather, brother, sister-in-law, nephew. I was in a very strange land, a land where one could forget one’s purse in a Burger King and have it returned two hours later, intact. Totally intact. And the teenager who found it would refuse a reward.

It was a nice land, but a very strange land. A local farmer ran lights around his pig sty, which made me laugh. Another one made a lighted cross out of his metal clothesline pole (I admit, that one made me gag).

I was invited, that Christmas (so it must have been the second one during my Tennessee tenure, because I spent the first in Florida with my mother) to a friend’s family Christmas dinner. Cathy’s family was big, close, and rural. Teetotaling. They were totally unlike any people I had ever, in my New York life, experienced for a New York minute. But her parents, Meme and George, “adopted” me. I never felt a stranger when I was with them, any or all of them. They treated me as family. That year, Meme had asked Cathy what I might like or need for Christmas, and the answer was slippers. I had, it is true, been wearing flipflops because paying for my horse was costly, and some things just didn’t fit the budget. In less than a New York minute, I loved Meme and George―now departed, long since departed in fact. I’ve lost touch with their daughter; perhaps that will come round again.

Life just goes round, though. So here I sit in Cornwall, England, my dog at my feet, my beloved horse 3,000 miles away in the very region I have been speaking of, my husband (a thing I once swore I would never have one of again, thank you very much, until I met Simon) in a room down the hall doing whatever magic he does with high-tech telecom inventions and such. And I still love PP&M. I lamented the loss of Mary some while back. Odetta somewhat later. Incredible singers of my youth, replaced more recently by Hayley Westenra and Celtic Woman.

Here’s an offering from PP&M. Nominally a Halloween song, I’ve always thought of it as a Christmastime tune. The more I listen to it, the more it seems to have Druid overtones, perfectly suitable for Yule.

Slainte!

Of eggnog, horrid cookies, delicious danish, and other fond memories at Christmas

Gardens at Cotehele, National Trust House at St. Dominick, Cornwall, in the snow

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s meant yearning to do a lot more than our family did as far as Christmas traditions. I suspect it was like that for a lot of urban/suburban families, coming to grips with the consumer society, longing for the older, less frantic society that still populated our grammar school readers, but not our homes―societies in which Pop cut down a Christmas tree, Mama helped the kids create garlands of cranberries and popcorn, and Grandma knitted yet another pair of striped socks, or maybe a scarf, while listening to I Remember Mama on the radio.

Perhaps farm families had lengthy traditions, but we were an urban family, and such traditions as we had were developed on the fly. One of my favourites involved egg nog. To this day, I don’t care for the semi-solid stuff one buys in grocery stores, unless there is a dollop of bourbon in it. My grandfather started adding some to mine when I was about ten. I waited for Christmas eagerly after that, mainly for the feeling of closeness to my beloved grandfather it gave me, and for the honour of being accorded such a treat, and the sophistication it bestowed when I told my friends about it.  (For any Brits reading this, one must remember the Puritan nature of the United States, and realize that it was anathema to allow one’s children so much as a whiff of spirits, never mind a dollop now and again. For anyone reading this, here are some festive alternatives for eggnog.)

My father’s contribution to the family traditions involved the Christmas eve afternoon visits to our house by those who supplied us with various things all year long. The postman (it was always a man back then), the man from Dugan’s Bakery who left the doughnuts and bread, the milkman, anyone who might have done some work on the house, the owner of the local gas station where we got virtually all our gas and had the family cars repaired, a neighbour or two. The men trickled in one by one over a few hours in late afternoon. My father would have a short drink with them, and, for those who had provided services, hand them an envelope with, I imagine, a card and a gift of money. Not that we had much, but my father believed in treating well those who had treated him well.

My mother’s contribution was cookies. She was not a skilful or even a willing cook. But she did make rolled sugar cookies every year, and we had an enormous assortment of cookie cutters, all of which I have retained although I have used them rarely.

My mother generally divided the dough and coloured some green, some red, some blue, leaving some natural. Then she and my brother and I would cut reindeer and stars and trees and sometimes unseasonal shapes such as Easter eggs that we would then tart up with paillettes to look like Christmas tree ornaments.  Always the reindeer had eyes made of Red Hots. Always the stars atop the trees had yellow sprinkles. Always the freestanding stars were totally covered in yellow sprinkles. We might stick a bit of dough on some of the reindeer noses and apply red sprinkles for the Rudolf effect.

My grandmother did most of the cooking, and a great deal of the gift-wrapping for the family and also for my father’s best friend, Jerry. Jerry had never married, but had an extensive roster of nieces and nephews to buy gifts for, and for me, of course. I was crazy about Jerry, and used to ask him to wait for me to grow up so I could marry him. He gave me my favourite childhood gift of all time, an elegant, swirling, big-sleeved dressing gown with red chickens on a white background on the outside, and quilted red satiny stuff on the inside. I wore it until it looked like a vest. And then I dressed my baby brother up in it to play house. (Lord knows, the poor kid should have been warped by what my best friend and I made him do when he was too little to object.)

Life went on, and traditions, along with family members, passed away. A few new ones developed, but very few. So, this holiday season when things are in flux even more than usual―as we await the completion of our new house in a new county in a new country―traditions seem suddenly important once again. Whether developing or remembered, traditions are playing a major role in my current psychodrama.

I would love to have those rolled sugar cookies. Truthfully, they were not delicious. They were only OK, and that meant the ones that were OK were the ones that weren’t singed a bit. (I did mention that cooking was not my mother’s forte.) But we ate them, because they were home made and it was Christmas. My grandmother’s double cookies, some filled with juicy raisins swimming in sugary sauce while others oozed raspberry jam, were much more eagerly consumed, but she didn’t make them every year. Indeed, she rarely made them, time-consuming as they were. She did make  a huge batch for me to take with me to college, thereby ensuring that I would make at least a few friends, although all of them were likely to have a sweet tooth.

My late friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor also came from a small urban family with few traditions. But as long as I knew him, each year he made pinwheels, like his mother used to make. Frankly, they were awful. He knew they were awful. His partner, Don, knew they were awful. I knew they were awful, but I also knew I was very privileged to be offered some when the entire reason for their existence was in homage to Jeffrey’s mother. Bless you, Jeffrey, then, now and forever…whatever forever is. I miss you.

And then there’s Noeleen. Noeleen is the best baker I have ever met, and this year I shall miss her annual gift of a homemade danish pastry, large enough to serve eight, wrapped in red tissue paper and a white doily and tied up with ribbon. I don’t think, even if she tried to send me one, that it would get through customs; it’s addictive, and they’d probably think it was a drug.

I never consumed my whole danish at once, but cut it and froze it in separate slices. One year, we had a blizzard a month or so after Christmas and Jeffrey and Don asked to borrow my snow shovel so they could free their car from winter’s caress. They volunteered to liberate mine, too.  I loathe shovelling, so I was happy to sweeten the pot with an offer of Noeleen’s danish and booze-laced coffee to warm them up afterward.

That was a great time. Any time with friends, food and a reason to celebrate is a great time. Traditions? Nice to have, if you have them. If not, make everything you do a tradition…the tradition of making lovely times, and recalling them fondly to warm your heart at will.