Pickled Gizzards

The other day I was talking to our youngest grandson Ronan, 23, in a conversation about changing printing technology, which touched on cameras, and we got to a point where I realised he barely knew what I meant by 35mm slides and getting film processed; which let me to mention slide nights. He commented that they sounded a wonderful alternative to board games and cards. (He clearly had no concept of the hours we sent listening to plays and serials on the radio either, but that’s for another day.)

While writing this post, I googled around to check a couple of things and I was astonished to find this page, https://uy.ebay.com/b/Collectible-Film-Slides/262415/bn_55190306 on which you can buy job lots of slides. (why? who knows …) There are many job lots offered – and it’s worth a read, as some of them are amusing, but the most impressive one so far is “1960s + World Travel ~ Photographer Estate 960 COLLECTIBLE TRANSPARENT SLIDE LOT ….. (sic) US $750.00 or Best Offer”

My father, Ronan’s grandfather, was a physics whizz and was always fascinated by new technological developments, that is by pieces of equipment and machines that do specific jobs. With the outbreak of WWII in the Pacific, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, RAAF, to serve as a radio operator in Papua New Guinea, but was soon moved over to the team developing the new RADAR technology for use against the Japanese who were rapidly moving down through South East Asia towards Indonesia and ultimately Australia.

Postwar he was an early adopter of the new fangled 35mm camera with images recorded onto the Kodak colour film that when processed came back mounted in 35mm card frames – which were called slides. Of course these were small things, and required a viewer or a projector so that we could see them well. Dad bought a projector, a tripod, and slow release trigger to enable him to press the button and quickly get back into position in a group photo. His brother, Uncle John, did the same, and they joined the large number of snap happy Australians recording in Kodak colour their families, gatherings of all kinds including school sports days, conferences, travel activities and community events.

Dad’s brother, Uncle John, was an industrial chemist working for the paper and particle board manufacturing mills at Burnie on the NW coast of Tasmania. In the mid to late 50s, the company sent him on a 4 or 5 months-long tour around some of the world’s most important paper and manufactured wood producing companies in Scandinavia, north America and Japan and there may have been others. I’m sure he’d have photographed lots of fascinating industrial plant, machinery and key personnel wherever he went to include in his reports to the company.

But along the way he also had days off for sightseeing, and my first recollection of a slide night was actually a saturday afternoon, when Uncle John and his family brought some slides around to project onto a lounge room wall. I think the aunts and Gran came too. The couch and all the chairs were moved to the opposite wall. The blinds were drawn, and in the breaks for reloading the slide carousels there were cups of tea, scones and Mum’s cinnamon tea cake to enjoy. It was a fantastic afternoon. Uncle John was a good talker, and told us such interesting things about his work trip he’d so clearly enjoyed (and it was clearly a huge feather in his cap to be sent on it) Young and old, we all asked questions, so it was very educational to hear his impressions of these places which we might have already seen in books, but which he’d actually visited! He had pics of places like the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace in London, the view from the Empire State building in NY, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Grand Canyon and Disneyland and what he told us about these things enthralled us.

As in many Australian families of the day, Mum and Dad occasionally invited friends over for a slidenight to tell of their latest holidays or travels, and they went to other people’s homes – it was a fairly common thing in those days before TV arrived in Tassie in time for the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. I’ve only just seen it because my subscription to The Australian lapsed there for a while, but one of my fav. columnists, Bernard Salt, recently wrote on the demise of some important social rituals in Aus: “The slide night was a means to showcase not so much foreign places but to demonstrate a measure of worldliness, which was (and still is) a prized quality in an isolated colonial society. Sadly, the slide night is no more but we still need or want its purpose; today it’s fulfilled by Instagram. Insta delivers better images and has scope for quirky commentary but it can’t replicate the warmth, the humour, the familial sense of occasion that was the slide night.” Absolutely, Bernard!

Teachers found sets of slides were wonderful teaching aids, and I myself used to lug around sets related to some of the art quilt workshops I taught in the 90s and 00s. I haven’t taught in-person classes for years now, but I do speak to fibreart and art quilt groups by zoom and now show power point collections of images of my own or other artists’ work to illustrate what I’m saying.

Up until early this century, entry into the prestigious art quilt exhibitions required full and detail image slides of whatever works we were entering, so we needed several duplicates of each so they could go back and forth in the mail, and it was usual for an organising entity to keep the slides of all those accepted. What a relief it was when digital technology took over, as today we just email images; even my photographer just sends huge image tif files suitable for publication within hours of taking the pics, and no longer sends them to me on dvds. I make copies of those originals and resize down to much smaller jpgs and thumbnails for my blog.

This morning an interesting post from Inspire Daily facebook post this morning popped up in my FB feed – telling how in 1927 a physician noticed the large numbers of tired looking, listless children were appearing in schools, and found that many of them had eaten no breakfast before coming to school – times were tough – the Great Depression was underway. Their attendance and academic performance overall was poor, and the doctor realised they were suffering from malnutrition. Due to his campaigning, the Norwegian government introduced free nutritious breakfasts for all Norwegian school children in 1932.

These were simple and served cold, but they were nutritionally well balanced with nutrients to foster physical growth and improved health. Called Oslo breakfasts, they consisted of a wholmeal bread roll, some cheese, vegetables, a piece of fruit and some milk, plus a spoonful of cod liver oil. Results were quite startling, as children began to show signs of growing taller than their average cohort had previously shown, and as academic performance levels increased, illness and absenteeism decreased.. By the late 30s and 40s the hugely successful program had been adopted by a number of other countries incuding Australia.

The appearance of that post in my feed this morning was an interesting coincidence (or was AI listening to our phone conversation? ) because just yesterday Ro and I had been talking about the difference in life expectancy between that of our parents’ generation, born around 1920, who expected to live into their 60s; and our own, the post WWII Boomers, born beginning in the late late 40s, who expect to live into our 80s – which I will reach this year.

Our family lived in Launceston, just a few doors up the street from the entrance to the school we all attended, Broadland House School, BHS. Naturally we went home for lunch most days, but once a week we were allowed to take homemade sandwiches (always mashed egg and chives, still my fav.) a piece of cake and some fruit for lunch at school (in addition to our usual play lunch for morning recess) Other girls who lived further away of course had to take a lunch box, and a handful of girls even had lunch in the boarders’ dining room, at considerable cost no doubt. I’m the eldest in the family, and when I was 8 or 9, the school Parents and Friends, P&F, trialled a new system – which I think was one day a week. On that day we could order what was called an Oslo lunch!!! I’m not sure but it might have been ordered the day before – but anyway on the day, we went into the assembly hall and collected a brown paper bag containing a some wholemeal bread with cheese, perhaps tomato and lettuce, and I think an apple. I don’t remember a drink but it was possibly choc milk. No codliver oil, though. But Mum was pretty diligent with the codliver oil when we were very little – Ro says we only had that revolting Scotts Emulsion administered to help us get through the winter colds and flu season, but I’m not sure it wasn’t occasionally dished out through the whole year 🙁 but anyway it’s also now available orange flavoured.

The lunch-making BHS mums welcomed the popular Olso lunches innovation, and I think that gave the P&F the green light to go ahead with the tuckshop plan, which probably started the following year, as it was only a short time that Oslo lunches were distributed in the school assembly hall.

As the city of Launceston is my home town in the state of Tasmania, I keep an eye on a Facebook page devoted to the history of Launceston and Northern Tasmania Recently someone posted 1969 photos of several streets and intersections in the central city area. I haven’t been to Launceston recently, but know shopping centres out in the suburbs have grown in importance and taken a lot of that bustle from the CBD over time. It was started by supermarkets and other important food shops, then shops other than supermarkets gradually moved into the biggest centres, eventually having several locations out of the city and, then branch offices of banks and even some government departments followed, and so on. In cities everywhere in the world this process has changed CBDs, including in our current city of Montevideo Uruguay, where it has been just as marked. On my first visit in 1989, the footpaths were crowded from 10am when the shops opened, to around 10 at night, but today there’s a mere fraction of the people in any street downtown.

People’s behaviour has changed, too. If she were still alive, my mother would probably regretfully comment on the clear drop in standards that people show when they go shopping today – she never left home to shop down town without being in one of about 2 of 3 suitable outfits complete with stockings (which had seams in those days ) hat and gloves. (perhaps with an audible sniff) When we were children, every home had bottled milk delivered every morning, usually from around 4 or 5 am to about 8am. The baker, green grocer and butcher would all deliver a couple of times weekly (many people had a standing order, and paid the bill at the shop monthly) Some green grocers and bakeries would also have mobile delivery vans that would visit areas at certain known regular times, so that when people expected them, they’d come outside and buy at their front gate. There were many more local post offices everywhere back then, so people walked to collect parcels sent to them, and letters were delivered to homes twice a day, between 8.30 – 11.30, and about 1 and 4, and once on saturdays. But for furniture, clothes, shoes, books, linen and bedding, fabrics, knitting wool and all kinds of other things, you had to ‘go to town’, literally. And one day a week, thursday afternoons, Mum would go to town. This meant leaving a baby sitter, Mrs Jessop, in charge of us, changing her clothes to a good outfit, selecting hat, gloves and handbag to complement that. She had the car that afternoon, to do who knows what around the town, and always brought home packets of multicoloured Fruity Chews which she’d give to us if Mrs Jessop confirmed we’d been good girls that afternoon – oh yes, we knew how to respond to that promise of a treat!

“Going to town” required being properly dressed. As someone on that FB paged commented, going to town was pretty up there with going to church, or going to Grandma’s for sunday lunch (both mandatory weekly fixtures in our young lives)

Now, another angle on this aspect of my upbringing comes from the visit by two friends a few days ago. One of them grew up in this very well heeled Montevideo suburb, Carrasco. She and her husband currently live in the central area of the city which is all undergoing some degree of gentrification. They’re renovating their 3 story building into a comfortable 2 story city home above a ground floor with a commercial space and two small apartments. They stopped at our nearest local supermarket for something to bring for lunch, and she commented that shopping there was so different to shopping in her downtown local supermarket.

It wasn’t just the obvious one of the different balance in the range of goods stocked. She commented on how people dressed – and I certainly do a visual check/slight upgrade, possibly even change a shirt, before I go shopping around here, because I have certain clothes I only wear at home doing chores and stitching. And I know that everyone else in the store will be well dressed and well turned out. Even if they’re shopping on the way home from the nearby sports club or gym, they somehow manage to look well turned out!

But my friend also said that even conversations between shoppers were very different, too, and this I must follow up that some time. Local shoppers of course know other local shoppers, but here they do tend to just stop where they are and chat on, seemingly oblivious to how they’re blocking other people until someone asks one of them to move – whereas where our friend shops, people tend to be much more aware of other shoppers and usually just step aside without being asked… interesting! But that’s for another day.

I often write about something from our Kalgoorlie-Boulder Western Australia days – because 13 of my 78 years (a bit over 1/6th of my life) was spent there, many wonderful memories remain, and so many things from those days( 1969-75 and 1981-87) continue to influence my life today. It’s probably a bit late now 🙂 but I’ve always said to Mike ‘If we need to go back to Kal, just say so and I’ll start packing straight away’.

Mike’s first employer there was the Great Boulder Mine, and in a time of acute housing shortage in the boom, two demountables, both sent up from Perth and placed on the mine’s leases, were our first two homes there after our wedding in Launceston, Tasmania in 1969. (in those days no one shacked up together before marrying, as that was the kiss of social death) We headed west from Tasmania to the amazing world of a mining district in the full swing of an exploration boom, for nickel, which began in the mid 60s and then with mining underway the exploration phase faded by the mid-70s, and we moved on up to the NT and Mt. Isa, about which I’ve already written a bit and will write more in time. Both our kids were born in Kalgoorlie, and we made some wonderful lifelong friends there, many of whom also moved on as mining people do early in their careers, but a few others are still there, as these days the city has matured and there are better options for those who decide to remain in retirement. When we were there it was very common for people to retire to Esperance or the Perth metro area.

To go to Kal in the nickel boom was a huge and pretty exciting culture shock to me. Apart from the locals, who were a particular breed – everyone else came from “somewhere else”, and had no ties in the town. So when we began producing children there were no nearby grandparents, for example – and there were effects about which I will write elsewhere. There was still no TV yet, and so people took part in a very busy cultural, social, church and community life, a lot of which revolved round the hotels, with darts, pool and billiards teams! The famous Hay Street brothels were openly tolerated as a social service in a community with big numbers of single men from ‘somewhere else’ working in the area, perhas our of town during the week but they came to town on the weekends only, and like ourselves, none had family ties. The brothels were of course also patronised by some of the locals, and were safely located just a block down the street from the main police station. The minute one of the madams reported a disturbance, she could count on instant police action to settle it and remove trouble makers.

There were many active sporting and social clubs including tennis, football, cricket, squash, horse and dog racing, swimming, athletics, golf, netball, cricket, rifle and pistol shooting clubs, and bowls – though I don’t recall any mention of my grandmother’s sport, croquet. Many social activities revolved around churches, too, and choirs and amateur theatricals thrived – as did almost every recreational or hobby activity you can think of! Newcomers and locals alike became creatively entrepreneurial, bobbing and weaving, some making their fortunes, others not so much.

In every boom, in the long run most money is made providing services to those who come seeking the big discovery. Quite a few people made and some lost huge amounts of money on the stock exchange. During the heady nickel boom, all around Australia people focused on daily movements on the stock exchange and participated in trading on their own accunt of through share clubs. One company, among many, that rose to glory in the boom (and most then crashed) was Poseidon, a company built around a fabulous discovery of nickel which was in huge demand at the time. One of my father’s friends bought some Poseidon shares at about $15 and promised to take his whole family on a trip to Europe if they hit $300; we all held our breaths as they moved up and up, climbing over $280, and then began to fall, fast – he managed to sell at something like $35/share, a fabulous enough profit over his initial investment, but so disappointing for the family! And he was one of the lucky ones! Others we knew who did well included a couple of state school teacher friends who started a successful truck hauling business, a coin operated laundry and a cafe in the main street; a nother local fruit juice vendor did really well and became something of a real estate mogul; a furniture salesman successfully branched into real estate; a market gardening family installed a large store/shed and stepped up from horse and cart vending to major local and regional suppliers of fruit and veg; a pharmacist bought a run down old business, revamped it and following that success branched into several other businesses; formerly employed on the mines, some industrial chemists set up analytical labs to contract mineral assaying for prospectors and small companies; small business owners became big businesses as the suppliers of equipment and consumables for the exploration industry; electrical appliance sellers made fortunes as the demand for fridges, fans, portable air coolers and other domestic appliances soared; automotive electricians and camping goods suppliers made fortunes equipping vehicles with 2-way radios and other gear for remote area travel; someone bought a small cafe that used to sell spaghetti bolognaise by the pot full at the door (bring your own pot) and expanded into a large modern motel with a high quality restaurant – both always pretty full. An associate of Mike’s who ran a drilling company always bought a parcel of shares in every company that contracted his services for diamond drilling – that last, most expensive but final exploration step that no one takes without having good results on previous programs. He made a good pile down the years. It was amazing to see the rise and fall of a boom – but I’ll go into the fall on another post.

I don’t really kow how we got onto the subject today, but I was talking with Ivan about how some of the most basic things like good quality shoes were costly (as they still are ) and how my mother, his grandmother, taught us her own values about clothing. I thought I’d written a post about it, but apparently haven’t, and so will start what could possibly be a series by the time I finish with the subject. Of course, as being the boy in our family of two children, he never knew the joys or the frustrations of being in a set of same sex siblings.

Mum’s Clothing Values can be summarised:

Mum’s clothes rules were simple –

(1) Always buy the good quality top brands, and (2) wear your oldest clothes at home to save the best ones for ‘going out’.

This second one is a good rule I still follow. Only just this week I’m facing the fact that I need to consider throwing out two pairs of much mended decade+ old MaggieT pants that really are literally almost falling to bits. They probably look really daggy, but they’re very comfortable to work in at home, and we fibre artists and quilt makers call these our ‘quilting clothes’. Really, I should just bundle them up and toss them out in the rubbish, as they’re way past donating to anyone I know. BUT the current household rubbish collection system here is toss everything into big foot operated pedal bins on every street block, which the intendencia empties three times weekly. Sounds gross, and it is. And there are poor people who scavenge in them. A couple of pairs of ladies pants could be a good find – so I will mend them and then put them out in a clear plastic bag beside, not in that bin, and in a very short time someone will pick them up to take home, I’m sure. But then, having mended them, I’ll probably keep them a while longer as quilting clothes 🙂

Of course, for school we had a uniform that had to be worn every school day, and a sport uniform too. There was no such thing as a ‘come as you are’ day back then, unthinkable. Our uniforms were of very good quality fabrics, and of course always had plenty of seam allowances built in, and plenty of hems…. to allow for growing girls and the likelihood of sisters coming along. But I’ll write at length about our school uniforms another time.

My grandparents had lived through The Great Depression, and Mum and Dad had lived through the privations of WWII, during which there was strict rationing of fabric, clothing and shoes, so families habitually kept one set of clothes for wearing when leaving the house for church, visiting and shopping; and older clothes were worn at home, usually with aprons over them over keep them from getting dirty while doing household jobs and gardening etc. The better off people also had a set of best clothes for attending weddings, parties or the theatre. Those Depression and wartime habits continued well into the 50s after rationing was lifted. Mum always put on her best day outfit to go to town shopping every thursday afternoon, changing into home clothes and shoes when she arrived back home.

The rule in such households was and probably still is, that as good clothing is grown out of it is always passed on down to the next sibling, and after that, if it is still good it is sent on to cousins, younger children of close friends, or donated. Although as the first born (ie in pole position for someting new) I sometimes had hand-me-downs from a couple of other families whose mothers were close to Mum, more often than not I got new, and Ro and Sal got new things less often. But there were a couple of times a year when all three of us got new outfits to wear for ‘best’. Early Autumn was the time to organise the new ‘best’ winter outfit for us all, and in Spring a new summer dress, which was typically worn on the Sunday School Anniversary weekend which I think was in October. It was often really a bit chilly so we usually had cardies or boleros over them.

Once we children were out of nappies, really we wore tartan skirts attached to cotton bodices with a long sleeved wool jumper/sweater over that. Those bodices could be easily replaced when worn out, or made larger – and there was always plenty of seam allowance, made possible with our bodices and attached skirt fastening all the way down the back with press studs, so there was overlap to let out a bit. Hems too, had plenty of allowance built in, being frequently let down or taken up according to which child was growing while wearing them. Mum only bought the very best quality wool fabric, which in her mind was English of course (Australia was still in The Empire and so in attitudes very Anglocentric) so all this altering was worth doing – those things lasted for years. For Sunday best and birthday parties when we were little, we wore puffed sleeve, smocked Vyella dresses (Vyella’s a brand of English fabric, a wonderful hard wearing wool and cotton blend) Mum did all the neck-to-waist smocking on the fronts, and those little dresses were easy to cut out and sew up, always with plenty of seam allowance to let out and plenty of hems to let down. And to go over them we had toning fluffy angora boleros that Mum had knitted, or toning wool cardigans (cardies) And for going outside we always had warm winter coats – we did grow up in Tasmania after all, and regardless of season, any day of the year could require a coat.

Twice a year all three of us had something new. I think it was probably 1954, the year we moved to Bifrons Court and I was 7, Mum began to engage a lady whose name I think was Mrs Bass, to come to our house and spend the day sewing these new dresses seated at Mum’s Singer treadly. She’d arrive around 9.30am, and start on the sets of pattern pieces for each dress that Mum had already cut out for her to sew. Stopping only for lunch around 12.30, Mrs Bass would sew on until about 4-30pm, and in that time she’d do all the machine sewing for our new best dresses, including any cuffs or collars, adding in any zips, all the fittings, make any alterations to the pattern and mark the hemlines for each one. By the time Mum drove her home late in the afternoon, there would be only buttons to sew on and all the hand stitched finishing including the hems, and then if any button holes were needed she’d take the dresses in to the Singer sewing shop where someone would do machine bound button holes. You could also get covered buttons made there, too, but those were only practical for garments like coats and jackets which were only drycleaned occasionally.

Mum always bought enough of the fabric in the one piece so that with careful cutting she could get 3 dresses cut from what was probably the yardadge for barely two and a half. So we were steps and stairs, all in the same outfit up until I was about 11 or 12, probably beginning to enter puberty and change shape.

I remember the joy of my first ‘bought’ best summer dress very like this one an abstract floral print in shades of mint green with touches of pink. It had a pink-piping edged peter pan collar, oval shaped pearlised pink buttons from neck to waist, cap sleeves and a 2-tiered lightly gathered skirt with a fine 1/2″ belt with fabric covered buckle. Very special, but of course as I was growing fast it didn’t last me for more than a year or so, and I don’t remember who got it next.

This 2019 post, https://pickledgizzards.com/aunty-myrtles-mouldy-cake/ features one of my mother’s aunts, Myrtle (her actual name) She passed away at least 45 years ago, having produced no direct descendants, so for reasons which will gradually become clear I will not identify her further.

Although Myrtle had no children herself, she was from a large family and most of her siblings married and produced several children of my mother’s generation, so she had many nephews and nieces, a couple of whom were lost in WWII. All her life Myrtle took a keen interest in all those nieces and nephews and their children, so by late in her life there would have been at least 35-40 people still living who she named in her will, including all the great nieces and great nephews of my baby boomer generation.

She was well into her 90s and by the time she passed away in 1978, at which time Mike and I and our two were living up in the Northern Territory, during what I call our Tent Period (go to glossary) Although I only met Auntie Myrtle a handful of times in my life, after her death, my sisters and I, all our cousins on that side, plus Mum and all her generation of the family, each received an allotment of shares from her estate. My sisters’ and my share parcels were much smaller than Mum received, but still marvelous, because I remember at the time my good solid industrials were valued at about $5000. I held on to them for 5+ years, reinvesting the dividends until a time when I needed a some money for a purpose that I felt sure she’d approve of, and was very grateful for her generosity, as indeed I still am.

Mum’s brother-in-law, Uncle Jack, was an accountant, and a conservative bricks and mortar investor himself. Myrtle married young but her husband died after only 2 years, before they’d produced any family, and she never remarried. Her late husband had been wealthy, and the young widow, Myrtle, was no doubt glad of Jack’s investment advice, but she was very astute in her own right, too. According to Mum, Jack always helped her prepare her tax filings and apparently never billed her for that, nor the investment advice he’d given her although he was not a licensed investment advisor. Within families, older family members often advise younger less experienced family members – it’s just something that many families do between themselves. At the time of her death in 1978, Myrtle’s commercial property portfolio was worth a very impressive $2+m, possibly in part to Jack’s helpful advice.

About 6 months before Myrtle died, and in sound physical and mental health, she’d had her solicitor draw up a new will, specifying bequests to all her nieces and nephews and all their children, naming every one of us; and leaving the remainder of her assets (ie. about 90%) to the man we refer to as Auntie Myrtle’s Last Gigolo.

I don’t know much about her gigolos, except that Mum told us that periodically Myrtle would have around her a regular male friend or escort, because she loved to attend and bet at all the horse and dog racing tracks, venues which no respectable woman would attend without a gentleman escort.  Mum and I presumed she had some business arrangement with those escorts, several of whom accompanied her for years apparently. It is known that the man we refer to as Myrtle’s Last Gigolo was a married man with wife and children all living just a couple of suburbs away from Myrtle’s home.

Auntie Myrtle didn’t leave anything to Uncle Jack himself, and it is an understatement to say he was highly offended and furious, and I can’t way whether that was reasnable or not, as we really don’t know whether Jack did or didn’t bill her for the annual preparation of her tax filings, and if he did, perhaps she paid him and regarded their relationship as solely transactional. After all, he was only married to her niece, and wasn’t a licensed investment advisor either, but we lived interstate and I never observed them together.

On legal advice Uncle Jack contested the will in the State’s Supreme court which denied his claim, because Myrtle had identified and named every blood connection in her family who might have had any claim to an inheritance, and had made some provision for every one of us. That unsuccessful challenge must have cost Uncle Jack a heap.

Myrtle was just one of Mum’s colourful rellies, and Mike says I should write ‘a Great Australian Novel’ based on her and more of the colour on Mum’s side of the family. While I might never get around to that, what I would like to do as an intermediate step is write a series of short stories, including the family drama of Myrtle’s Last Will and Testament, as it was an amazing document that stirred up an emotional, legal and financial hornets’ nest in my mother’s corner of the family, but some of the other descendents might have been stirred up too!

In both Mike’s and my families there have been a couple of other interesting or even dreadful ‘last testament and will’ stories, and I’m sure there are in many other families, too…. so I’m going to put out a call on my social media and close contact lists to see if I can get some interesting outlines of dreadful or marvelous wills around which to build a series of short stories.

(Please feel free to leave a question or comment, below, or email me directly)

It’s Christmas Eve but only in the last couple of days have I started to feel ‘Christmassy’. To be fair, for the last two weeks we have endured construction noise and dust quite a bit later than we expected when we signed a contract a few months ago to install an elevator in the house. We thought it would be all finished and fully functioning by year’s end, but not so – and work resumes in the second week of January. It’s not so much ‘in’ the house as ‘added onto it’, beginning in the garage and going through the upper patio to the first floor with entry into my sewing room. With all that construction noise including prolonged jackhammering, angle grinding and drilling, plus workmen up and down stairs, and dust everywhere, inside and out, we just didn’t get round to putting up the usual tinsel and shiny glass balls out on the patio; and today it’s slightly raining, anyway. Tomorrow’s forecast looks similar, so we may not be spending the day out on the patio under the grape and kiwi fruit vines with our Aussie house guests (Graciela, Heaton and Leti) Anyway, here’s what outside looked like this time last year –

Tomorrow’s dinner menu is all cold dishes – chicken and matambrito de cerdo which is spanish for rolled pork belly (US) or pork flap (Australia) Stuffed with finely sliced apple, onion, and prunes, rolled and oven baked the day before, it also freezes fabulously well. Tomorrow we’ll serve some with salad greens, baby tomatoes and potato salad. Mike’s made a jellied dried fruits christmas pudding with spices and a touch of rum in the jelly (divine) to be topped with whipped cream. There’s plenty of cheese and crackers, fresh fruit and icecream around for anyone who’s still hungry.

Rolled And Stuffed Pork Flap, Pork Belly, or Matambrito de Cerdo

I’ve been making this recipe for decades, and as I don’t have it written down anywhere, I’m pretty sure that it came from watching it made by a Danish neighbour, Ingrid, who lived next door on the Great Boulder Mine in the Nickel Boom days, pre-1975. Her Danish cooking was was probably quite traditional, but I’ve never had the opportunity to go to Scandinavia. Graciela watched as I put the first of four together, and then she assembled a couple which included this piece that looked remarkably like the shape of Australia when taken from its package and spread out…

• Sprinkle with a little freshly ground pepper, finely sliced white onions, finely sliced apples (preferably Granny Smiths) and seedless prunes (people can add salt if they want at the table)
• Note that the size of the flap will determine how much apple, onion and prunes you’ll need. But for two large flaps (~30cm) and two small ones (~20cm) yesterday, we used about 3 cups seedless prunes, one medium white onion and 3 peeled and sliced Granny Smiths We each ate a piece of apple and a prune or two to finish those bits off.
• Roll the flap+fillings and secure with two or three large metal skewers to make it possible to tie string tightly around the meat roll, every ~3cm. Remove skewers and use on the next one.
• The ends tend to be untidy and loose,- so poke the escaping prune, apple and onion bits back inside, and fold down the edges of the flap, securing with tooth picks wherever you need to. These stay in during cooking and are removed before serving.
• Place rolls on a rack in an open baking dish in a medium oven until the coating is golden-medium brown (a lot of the fat drains out during cooking) Although it can be eaten hot with veggies or cold with salads, it is easier to slice when cold.
• Slice at least 1cm thick and serve with salad or veggies – or as an item on a charcuterie board.
• You could vary the filling – apple, fresh garlic and rosemary would be nice.
• Now that I’m writing about this, I’m thinking I want to try a beef flap, which is available here – I guess I’d look for matambrito de carned, or something. I’ve never eaten any beef prepared this way, and Mike says we’d be looking at something like 1-2m sq+ of ‘flap’ – but of course that could be cut in half or quarters, and different fillings tried. I’ve put in a purchase order, and I’ll let you know how it goes!