Dear reader – I’m sooo sorry I’ve neglected you! I can’t believe how long it is since i wrote here…
First – this is not a recipe, sorry – but this is a food related tip that I myself devised a few hours ago while preparing veggies for stirfry, or as they call it here, ‘vegetales wok’
My children are probably ignorant of the term ‘threescore and ten’, but it was commonly used as a Biblical allusion referring to the length of a human life (“The days of our years are threescore years and ten;” Psalms 90:10, KJV). “Score” means twenty, so threescore (3×20) and ten would be seventy years. So, having lived well past that, my age group can look back over enough time to see some major historical events in the world, not all of which struck us as being very significant at the time. However, others we immediately identify as groundbreaking or catastrophic without measure. And no matter how grim things are just now, nothing stays the same for ever. I know, I know – I’m an optimist, the glass is half-full kind of person.
I read a lot, and much of of it is to keep up with news and current events on three continents – the one I come from, the one I’m living on, and the one all our offsprings are living on. TV’s great for that, but I do better reading analysis by the ‘experts’ lined up by the mainstream media I trust, or by listening to some of the excellent podcasts available.
The early October Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent escalation has taken a lot of attention away from the disastrous war in Ukraine, and I feel the world now is in it’s most dangerous condition since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. (the 9/11 Twin Tower attack not withstanding) I was a teenager then, and nightly the tv news talk of the threat of a nuclear war was quite frightening, and some some days several girls came to school crying. Our parents were very worried, their generation having lived the experience of Australia fighting against the advancing Japanese in WWII.
At Broadland House, my Anglican girls school, our history teacher was Miss Rooney, the excellent school principal with an excellent academic record in history, the subject she loved. However, like many brilliant people she asssumed we all had a natural inborn interest in her subject, and her very old fashioned teaching style, while possibly ok for university classes, was pretty boring to uncommitted teenage girls with all the distractions our lives were coping with at the age of 15-16. In history class she mostly read from our text book, but some days for a change in pace we had to copy notes from the blackboard. As a result, history did not come alive for me at that time, and as soon as I could I opted out of her classes to take economics instead. At university I took political science for a year, and too late realised that those friends who survived Miss Rooney’s history course were justifiably absorbed in history at tertiary level. I’ve frequently regretted not having a stronger history background, but one way and another I’ve been filling in gaps ever since. Despite the awful state of the world today, as measured against the length of history, it is all fascinating, and I frequently find myself thinking or saying out loud that nothing stays the same for ever.
In the couple of years that saw the onset and height of the Covid pandemic, I spent more time stitching, so listened more to recorded books and podcasts, and read very few actual books – perhaps 4 or 5 over that whole time! But because I belong to a private, subscription library/book club, I recently resolved to get back to reading more actual books for pleasure, because we have some great titles in our collection.
For an annual fee of US$150, the group orders and brings down here to Uruguay recently published books (in English) from both UK and USA. The club was formed about 40 years ago, with half the membership being Uruguay nationals, and the other part comprised of english speaking expats usually here for a few years as accompanying spouses of diplomats and executives of banks and major companies with branches here in Montevideo. Back then, books in english were difficult to find and very expensive. Accompanying wives needed social contact while their husbands worked, and not all were avid golfers, tennis players or keen to be involved in charity projects.
This demographic has changed however, as not only do some diplomatic wives have work within their country’s mission, but trailing spouses and partners often work or study remotely while they’re here; and computers, ipads and kindles have eliminated the book problem. Another change in the ~20 years since I’ve been a member, and is that on the Uruguayan side of the membership, the middle aged women with kids at school or studying who would have joined are now working themselves. Also during that time, sadly, several of the older members have passed away, so the group is very gradually dwindling – the old order changeth etc. However it continues to be a wonderful social group, and to make the most of my subscription, I’ve determined I should read 2-3 books per month from it, aiming for about 50 pages a night, perhaps a bit more on a miserable wet day! Now that I’ve resumed reading a bit of my book each night, that book on my bedside table beckons each evening, and I’ve found it really is a better way to wind down at the end of the day than doing a final check of whatever’s on my phone. In the past week I’ve really enjoyed Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadmnan, and tonight will start The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers.
For many years I’ve listened to recorded books while making my textile art, a habit that increased if anything during the pandemic, as I had much more time to put into stitching. I’ve just begun re-listenening to Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience… a book compiled by Shaun Usher, and which I enjoyed so much that I proposed it for discussion at the next online meeting of a book discussion group I belong to; and there’s a second volume I’ll listen to before the next discussion!