I have a sort of thing about mills. We used to live in a railway house called 7 The Mill so presumably one of the bigger houses was the mill.
I don't know. Just that the river was nearby and the big house above it was presumably the mill. There was a bridge across the river. It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I sold the house within a year of my husband dying by which time I was thirty eight. I couldn't bear to live at this house we had built together. That along with the house where I lived when I was a small child, the farmhouse where we lived when first married and the house I live in now which has all the original fireplaces and a lot of lovely stained glass are my favourites of all the houses I know.
Anyway, back to mills. I read a lot of Victorian fiction and mills do tend to come into it. The Mill on the Floss I am about to read. I'm in love with George Eliot at the moment. I fall in love with a different victorian writer each year somehow. Last year it was Elizabeth Gaskell and before that it was Henry James. Anthony Trollope is my top novelist. He has written a wonderful book called the Vicar of Bullhampton and a mill is the most important building in it.
My great grandfather was a miller in Stanhope. I had forgotten that until this moment. He was also a painter and painted lots of cows and hills. I wouldn't say he was a brilliant painter but we liked his paintings and I like the smell and the look of mills. I've visited many but the one I loved best was the mill where my husband and I used to go to collect our flour in the early days of our marriage. I don't even remember where it was, I think somewhere in Northumberland but it was a sort of pilgrimage. I used to make bread and make all different kinds of loaves. I made a wonderful rosemary plait and breakfast buns which had wholemeal flour in them.
Lately since my children brought me a tagine and a cookery book back from Morocco I've started making flat breads of different types. I haven't done that for years but cookery is back in my life so maybe I will carry on like that, after thirty years of not making much bread I'm addicted once again.
I am rereading Elizabeth David's Yeast and Bread cookery. My old paperback is in a bad way so I'm thinking I might buy a good hardback copy if I continue on like this.
In the meanwhile I need to find a recipe so that I can make bread in the morning. There are certain things which smell so much better than anything else, fresh coffee, a red wine beef casserole, bread baking and basil. All my favourites. My garden is filled with herbs.
I used to treasure my lovely wooden worktops in my kitchen. Now they are all covered in burn marks and rings of stuff which I put down and left. I was going to sand and varnish them but I'm not going to because I'll be so busy filling the kitchen with the smell of fresh bread and chicken with green olives and preserved lemon tagging that I don't care about daft stuff like that any more.
Saturday, 19 January 2019
Monday, 7 January 2019
Any Day but Sunday
When I was a little girl Sunday was always the best day of the week. Sunday night was rubbish because we had to have a bath and Monday was school but the dawning of Sunday was the best ever. We didn't have the kind of awful Sundays which other people had, church and silence and being good except when I had to go and spend the afternoon in my father's car with his parents as he drove them around the reservoirs! I soon got out of this and elected to stay at home with my mother since I was always horribly car sick. You can get out of a lot of stuff if you can claim car sickness. threaten to throw up on the leather seats gets you a long way.
Apart from that Sundays were good. My father hated church. I think it had something to do with the idea that he thought his mother wanted him to be a vicar. Thinking back I think he probably imagined this or made it up since his father owned a steelworks and he would undoubtedly end up there but anyhow he had an aversion to church so we never went. Sunday school was awful so maybe I went once or twice but to us Sunday was the day when you did what you wanted.
The Sunday papers took up a huge amount of space, my mother spent her morning peeling vegetables, checking on the roast and helping herself to sherry. I don't think my father did anything much other than read the newspapers
We ate at one or was it two? Whatever, we were always very hungry by the time we sat down and ate and boy, could my mother make a Sunday roast. We didn't have pudding but you didn't need it. We would have half a dozen vegetables, Yorkshire pudding which my father and sister had first smothered in gravy and white pepper and the cauliflower had white sauce and the meat was always superb. My mother was a farmer's daughter and wouldn't have settled for anything less. We had pork with crackling she had laced with salt, sirloin with horseradish, lamb with garden mint, never chicken. By then chicken had become almost commonplace. We had turkey at Christmas.
On Mondays the leftover from the roast was minced or turned into a frying pan dish with potatoes and onions.
On Sunday evenings when we had tea it was pork sandwiches with sage and onion stuffing and of course my mother made the stuffing. And in the afternoons she made cakes.
How on earth she found the energy I have no idea. I was thinking earlier today that we all went to private school and every garment had to have a name tag sewn on to it. She had help but dear God, it must have been tedious. We had a big house, loads of washing and ironing, three meals a day, mostly hot meals though as we got older we had cereal for breakfast which must have been a blessing.
After I married we determined not to have Sunday dinners so Sunday was still the best day of all. We ate in the evening, I made a good dinner every night, no fish fingers and chips for us. we made the best of the day and then ate late with good red wine.
Now Sunday is the hardest day. Living alone makes weekends almost endless, Sunday is empty so you have to fill it with things and sometimes it's too difficult;. Now Monday is my official day off so I like Mondays better than any other day. I don't take the day off. I work early and late and in between I usually go to the spa and toddle up and down he pool and then read. Monday is wonderful, things are back to normal and I stop holding my breath. Every day now is better than Sunday.
Apart from that Sundays were good. My father hated church. I think it had something to do with the idea that he thought his mother wanted him to be a vicar. Thinking back I think he probably imagined this or made it up since his father owned a steelworks and he would undoubtedly end up there but anyhow he had an aversion to church so we never went. Sunday school was awful so maybe I went once or twice but to us Sunday was the day when you did what you wanted.
The Sunday papers took up a huge amount of space, my mother spent her morning peeling vegetables, checking on the roast and helping herself to sherry. I don't think my father did anything much other than read the newspapers
We ate at one or was it two? Whatever, we were always very hungry by the time we sat down and ate and boy, could my mother make a Sunday roast. We didn't have pudding but you didn't need it. We would have half a dozen vegetables, Yorkshire pudding which my father and sister had first smothered in gravy and white pepper and the cauliflower had white sauce and the meat was always superb. My mother was a farmer's daughter and wouldn't have settled for anything less. We had pork with crackling she had laced with salt, sirloin with horseradish, lamb with garden mint, never chicken. By then chicken had become almost commonplace. We had turkey at Christmas.
On Mondays the leftover from the roast was minced or turned into a frying pan dish with potatoes and onions.
On Sunday evenings when we had tea it was pork sandwiches with sage and onion stuffing and of course my mother made the stuffing. And in the afternoons she made cakes.
How on earth she found the energy I have no idea. I was thinking earlier today that we all went to private school and every garment had to have a name tag sewn on to it. She had help but dear God, it must have been tedious. We had a big house, loads of washing and ironing, three meals a day, mostly hot meals though as we got older we had cereal for breakfast which must have been a blessing.
After I married we determined not to have Sunday dinners so Sunday was still the best day of all. We ate in the evening, I made a good dinner every night, no fish fingers and chips for us. we made the best of the day and then ate late with good red wine.
Now Sunday is the hardest day. Living alone makes weekends almost endless, Sunday is empty so you have to fill it with things and sometimes it's too difficult;. Now Monday is my official day off so I like Mondays better than any other day. I don't take the day off. I work early and late and in between I usually go to the spa and toddle up and down he pool and then read. Monday is wonderful, things are back to normal and I stop holding my breath. Every day now is better than Sunday.
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