Learning to cook

can be simple or complicated.  It seems to err on the side of "complicated" for many people.

My cousin's partner sent me a recipe for a cake yesterday. He is an extremely intelligent man who has taught himself to cook and bake. He approaches the whole business of food and eating in the same intelligent way he once approached his work. (He had a very high powered legal role in finance until he retired.) 

R...wrote the recipe himself and gave me all the information I need if I decide to make the cake. (I don't do much baking.)

I mentioned this to a visitor and she asked, "How did you learn to cook?"  The answer to that is both simple and complicated. My paternal grandmother taught me the basics. Grandma was a basic, no nonsense sort of cook.  She grew up on a farm where they made their own bread and their own butter. Her father or, later, one of her older brothers killed the sheep they used for meat. They grew their own fruit and vegetables. 

Grandma didn't know about pizza or spaghetti bolognaise or hamburgers. Chicken was something you had as a very special treat and sausages were what you had on the barbecue cooked by my grandfather if we went on a winter picnic. Grandma could make pastry and thus pasties. She made oatcakes but Grandpa made the porridge. There were sometimes puddings for a second course but most often it was fresh fruit in summer and stewed fruit in winter. There were scones and cakes to feed hungry children and then grandchildren.

Grandma taught me all these things along with soup and stews and the weekly roast. There was "shepherd's pie" and fish on Fridays. The fish on Fridays was not because she was Catholic but because that was the day local people could buy directly from the small boats that came into the port.

Grandma took me with her when she went shopping along the road which led to the jetty. There was a butcher who knew she knew about meat. There was a greengrocer who knew she knew about quality as well as quantity. There was a bakery where Grandma talked about the quality of yeast with the baker's wife. All of them treated her with respect.  

I don't know how they treated other women or how much other women knew. It was almost certainly far more than it is now.  They all did far more cooking than anyone I now know. There are some who still cook "from scratch" but by no means all of them do. 

I was teaching the Whirlwind to cook and to bake. She actually wanted to learn. Food generally just appeared on the table at her boarding school.  It was good but it did not have that "extra" that is home cooking. Her father was deeply appreciative of being able to take out a home cooked frozen meal. Yes, he could cook but it was "basic" and he knew she could do far more than he could. 

The two boys across the road are growing up and their mother, a busy doctor, has found time to teach them some early basics. They wouldn't starve. Next summer, if I am still in this house, we have agreed they will come and learn to make pasties. 

But, I have to confess, if we make those pasties then I will succumb to buying the frozen pastry sheets....I still can't make pastry the way Grandma did.  

Truanting, skiving off, wagging

or just plain "not going" to school?

I never deliberately stayed away from school for a day and my siblings didn't either. We would not have dared to "take a day off". On the very, very rare occasions we were ill we knew we would still be expected to do school work. I was quite knowingly sent to school with "German measles" or rubella because it was thought that it was actually a good thing to infect as many little girls as possible and "get it out of the way".  

And of course we had the added problem that our mother "did not believe in illness" of any sort. Her "Christian Science" beliefs did not allow for that. Until we moved back to the bush it was my paternal grandmother who would care for us if we were too ill to be at school. She would appear with such comforts as hot water bottles and "beef tea". Mum simply withdrew after making sure we had school work to occupy us. She didn't want to know. It is just as well we were very rarely ill enough to need to miss school.

When I was teaching I never had a child deliberately miss a day or a parent who would have condoned such a thing. My problem was the reverse. I had children who did not want to miss a day. I know I had one child who had insisted on coming to school although he was obviously not well enough. His mother sent a message. "He is not contagious. Let me know if he falls asleep." (It was a Friday and he didn't want to miss the next chapter of "The Silver Sword". I was reading it to them in the last period while they got on with knitting their football beanies. He admitted this to me the following week. "You could have read it for yourself," I told him. He grinned at me, "That wouldn't be the same!")

But apparently there are now an increasing number of parents who are much less concerned about whether their children are actually attending school. Some parents are even being threatened with court action. This puzzles me. School is all too often seen as not just school but a sort of free child minding service. There is also a much higher number of "school refusals" - children who do not want to go to school. 

"He tells us he hates school," one mother told me some time ago in the library. He had been failing to attend school and I had noticed him more than once. He found places where he could read without too many people taking notice. Yes, he should have been at school. When I talked to him he just shrugged and said, "It's so boring and it's noisy all the time." It was clear the learning environment did not suit him. He now goes right into the classroom under parental control and I suspect that is even worse.  

I know he is an exception though. He is a child who is happy to learn but not in the way he is being told he must learn. He is not a child from some of the outer suburbs of this city, a child who simply wanders the streets and gets into serious strife out of boredom. Even in the unlikely event their parents took them right into the classroom would they stay? At secondary level they might simply leave at a lesson changeover. It would be almost impossible to stop them.

When I think about it perhaps the remarkable thing is that so few students do actually deliberately truant. This morning when it is not just cold but wet and windy a warm classroom seems inviting. 

Economics or education?

I have a rather long letter in the state newspaper this morning. I was not sure it would get in or, if it did get in, they would use it without "editing" it. There is always a danger that the point you wish to make can get edited out and you then appear to be saying something entirely different.

But no, this one was printed in full. I was commenting on the proposed merger of two universities in this state. We have three universities at present. One is of course the oldest and first of them. It is the university the Senior Cat and Brother Cat attended. (I first went to university in another country.)  It was a traditional university back then. It produced more than one Nobel Prize winner and has had others on the staff. I worked there for a while.

Over the years it has become more conscious of what can only be called "economics". Some of the traditional courses have been cut back to a minimum. Almost all of them have been in "the arts". While "aboriginal languages" have been given a boost in funding the teaching of other modern languages has declined. English is also on steady decline. Psychology has moved to focus on "workplace" issues. Linguistics demands work in the aboriginal languages of this state. Philosophy is all too often demanding the agreement with woke ideas. There is more demand to agree in Economics, Business and Marketing. Even Law has not escaped entirely with woke ideas being presented and demands they be argued.

And we have the science side, physics and astrophysics

"Students don't want to do those. There's no work in those areas," I am told of arts subjects. They are also being told this. Students are being shunted into science. 

I wonder how the Whirlwind would cope if she was still alive. At school she was under pressure to "choose science". She was not interested. She studied the science which was compulsory. She didn't "hate" it but she didn't enjoy it. Words were of far greater interest. From the time she was small and I was reading stories to her she had wanted to know the meaning of words and where they had come from. Unlike so many young people I know she actually used her dictionary. By that I mean she did not simply look at the definition of a word but also at the origin. 

Despite all this she was still under pressure to "choose science because that is where the jobs are".  It did not seem to occur to anyone other than her father or myself that she might not be happy "doing science". There are still roles for our arts students. She had thought of things like translating and interpreting, librarianship and law. I think she would have been very good at any of those things. I doubt she would have made a good scientist. She would tell me, "I do not like science pracs" - laboratory sessions in science. That she was doing well in them was beside the point. She did not like doing the work. 

I wonder how many other young students are like this. How many of them are being told, both directly and indirectly, that they "must" do science? If they do add an arts subject to the mix it is the sort of English where they "study" film posters and make short films. (Yes, that's fine in a way but there is more to English than that.) If they choose to do a language it will be one that is considered "useful" rather than a language they can actually use with their own relatives.

I may be wrong but I can't help feeling education is becoming about the economic interests of society rather than the actual education of all of us.  

Stealing food should not

be "necessary" in order to eat. This is not the 1800's. 

I am conscious of places like the Foodbank and the van which feeds some of the homeless. When the Senior Cat was alive and going to church each Sunday I would hand him items of food or toiletries to go in the box which was taken to the Magdalen Centre in the city.There it would be distributed to people in need.

I have tried to go on doing that. Now I wait until I have a box full and then a friend takes it up to the church for me or D...., the priest, will call in for more timber from the shed and take it with him. No, I am not "rich" in the sense that I can buy a lot but I am careful. I can budget. In that way I consider myself to be fortunate.

My mother was good at doing this. My grandmothers were good at doing it too. My maternal grandmother needed to do it. My maternal grandfather was not a good provider. He could have been, indeed should have been, but the money often went elsewhere. My mother was taught how to manage on very little. We had very little when I was young. Teachers did not earn much and the Senior Cat was paying fees to do his university degree as well. 

My early memories of food are of endless meals of lamb stew made from the cheapest cuts of meat or cheap minced beef with lots of rice or potato. There were other vegetables from the garden and fruit from the trees at my paternal grandparents' home. School lunches were often a Vegemite sandwich - the cheapest possible filling. As children we didn't expect anything better and I think it is likely that children right around us were eating much the same way. 

But, we ate. We grew. There were probably children who were going hungry but I strongly believe that almost all children came to school with something much the same as me to eat. There were even children who bought their lunch from the tuck shop on a regular basis. Their fathers were probably the well paid "wharfies", men who worked on the docks. 

When we moved to the country it was not much different. The bread was generally home made because there was no bakery in any of the places we lived in. The sandwich fillings became mutton from the Sunday roast, wallaby or kangaroo, or Vegemite again. Fruit was more scarce. We all found the quandongs too sour to eat without sugar. My mother would give us a few dried apricots or a dozen or so sultanas along with an apple bought at a shop in a town some distance away. Any other fresh fruit was very expensive, far too expensive for most people.

At night people ate mutton and more mutton. It was killed on the farm. We got our share from a local farmer - a hind quarter one week, a forequarter the next. Mum would make it last. She added potatoes, pumpkin and carrots. The peas came from a packet labelled "Surprise". It was a monotonous diet but we accepted it.

Now I wonder about the people here in the city who, according to the article in this morning's paper, are stealing food to survive. I have no doubt that some of them are very short of money. I have no doubt they are really struggling to survive and feed their children but I wonder how well they would survive if they were put out into the remote areas we lived in and had only the food my mother and the other mothers had. Those remote farms did not have much in the way of vegetable gardens. There was no water for that sort of thing. You had a bath once a week and all washed in the same water. 

Here there is plenty of food on the shelves in the supermarket and much of it is "own brand" now. Occasionally I have looked at things I might need to buy if I was feeding a family. I think I could feed them quite well on a very limited budget. The problem is that it would take time and knowledge to prepare the food. It is something many people no longer have. It would also mean having a family willing to eat a diet which many people would find dull now, which children might resent. There wouldn't be pizza or other fast food. 

Nobody should be going hungry here but whether some of them are able to prepare and willing to eat what we ate may be something that needs thinking about. If they were it might leave more for those who are in really desperate need.

Railway journeys alone

are on my mind - but not in quite the way you might think. 

Something popped up on Facebook yesterday. I don't know how I came to get it but it was about the tiny spur line near one of the places we lived in when I was a mere kitten. 

I know I have mentioned it before but someone was talking about the excitement of using it to go fishing from the jetty at the end of the road. I had not forgotten seeing the boys (they were always boys) with their fishing lines. I remember seeing them on the train. They would go on to the stop at the far end of the road, across the Esplanade and on to the jetty. Brother Cat always wanted to go with them but was considered too young. Still, there were boys of nine or ten among them, little older than he was.

I also remember something else. What I had forgotten was how many times I must have done it. I went on the train alone. I started to do this at age seven. This must seem extraordinary now. If I was going to see my "other" grandmother "Nana" then my mother or my grandmother "Grandma" would take me to the station. I would pedal my tricycle and it would be "parked" in the station master's little office (where it must have been in the way of his duties). A ticket would be bought and I would wait sitting on the seat for the train to come. 

When the train arrived the station master would help me on to the train and inform the guard I was going "all the way". "Nana" would meet me in the city and we would catch another train to her home which was just behind another train station. (We would climb through the back fence to get to her house.) 

When it was time for me to go home in the afternoon it would all happen in reverse except that the station master at my home station would simply see me off down the street to my own home. I would cross three small streets on my tricycle alone. I must have done that journey several dozen times. Nothing ever went wrong that I remember. 

It is something you would not even consider allowing a child to do now, particularly a child who had problems getting on and off the train. (The guards used to lift me on and off because I was not steady enough on my feet to get off alone.)

I liked those train journeys. It wasn't because I was going to visit "Nana" - something I didn't actually enjoy at all - but because I liked to watch out the window or read a book. I knew I wasn't supposed to talk to strangers, particularly strange men, but no man ever bothered me. There were always people on the train going into the city. On the way home there were not as many but there was always someone, often someone I knew. They often knew the guard too. 

It was always considered safe for me to do it. I wonder at that now. I also wonder that there are children now who have never been on a bus or a train. They have always travelled in cars and even planes. They would have no idea about how to pay for a bus or train journey but I knew. I was the one who asked for my ticket and paid the money. Now, I can't even do that because I just validate my plastic card.

I'd like to do it just once more, do it the old fashioned way with a station master, a guard and a little cardboard ticket.  

"The oldest living culture...

on earth" is the proud claim of some indigenous people in this country but is it true?

It may be but the claim does not take into account at least two things I can immediately think of. The first is that there is no single culture which relates to all indigenous people here. The second is that we have near neighbours who might well make the same claims.

There are, despite the recent trend to say "First Nations", no nations among the indigenous people in this country. There were tribes and clans and there are still tribes and clans but there were no "nations". Before white settlement many indigenous people moved within just a small area of the continent. People on one side of the country were not even aware of people on the other side. People in the north were more likely to be aware of inhabitants in the islands to the north. People in the far west of the country did not know people in the far east of the country. Their languages and cultural practices were quite different. 

The idea that there is some sort of single "oldest living culture" is nonsense but it keeps being repeated.

And then, if we look a little further north, there is a large island across a short stretch of water. It is the world's second largest island - divided into two Papua and Papua-New Guinea. It is mountainous and, as is the case with such geography, it also has many small tribal groupings. Each of those has a language and a culture too. Some of those areas are so remote it is only possible even now to reach them on foot. In some places contact with the outside world is still very limited.  I am quite certain that some of those people, if the concept was explained to them, would claim to have "the oldest living culture on earth". 

I do know though that their languages do not meet the needs of living in urban communities in this century. This is much more than a matter of translating from one language to another. There are concepts which do not exist, for which there are no words and no combination of words. Their lifestyle and relationship with others can still be very limited, much more limited than anything in this country. There are still groups who live in their own remote valleys and with whom contact is not merely difficult but dangerous.  

Do we have that in this country? No, we don't. There are some relatively isolated communities but they have much more ready contact with the rest of the country. Vehicles and satellite dishes, shelter and much more have eroded languages and cultures to the extent that there isn't as much left as we are often led to believe. The idea that some sort of single "oldest living culture" has been retained or that what is left can even be preserved is simply false.  It is as false as believing the Picts have retained their language and culture against the invasion of my Norse ancestors.  

I have said elsewhere in this blog that the "traditional dot paintings" claimed by some indigenous people are not actually traditional at all. They date from 1971 and the idea was introduced by an art teacher of European origin. Now you are not supposed to try and copy this style and it is held to be "traditional". It isn't but the media has many people convinced that it is. There is more to the "oldest living culture" claims than that but the idea that there is some sort single, pure culture across the continent is wrong. We might do more to save the remnants of the cultures which are left if we recognised that.

 

Who is Taylor Swift?

I was asked this question yesterday by an elderly dog walker (in their 90's) who stopped for a moment to check on me.

"Some sort of pop star," was my response. He nodded and then said, "I don't understand the fuss they are making...all those people spending all that money to go to a concert."

I don't understand it either. There are two people I know who are flying interstate, paying accommodation for a night as well as paying for tickets to see this person perform.

Now she may be good, very good. I have no idea but I worked out that the cost for them both to do this is much more than I would be prepared to contemplate. The tickets cost between $79 and $379 each. The air fare is around $520. Accommodation I cannot guess at because I don't know where they are planning to stay or for how long. It won't be long though - two nights at most. Then there are the other expenses of food and transport to and from the concert. It will probably cost them at least $800 each for a couple of hours of entertainment.

They are excited and I really do hope they enjoy it - but I wouldn't do it.  If there was someone performing here, someone I really wanted to see perform in person then I might be prepared to pay for one of the cheaper tickets. And yes, I do know something  about the expenses involved in putting on these concerts. My late cousin was the manager for more than one very well known group. Some of his tales were hair raising. 

And I also thought of another group we grew up with, something quite different. The "Harold Raymond" concerts were given to raise money for what was then our residential school for blind children and deaf children.  They were put together by "Mr Raymond" and consisted of a small group of people, some of whom volunteered, Mr Raymond's pianist and Mr Raymond himself. Mr Raymond was blind but he travelled the state far and wide with the help of his pianist and the volunteers. The school children in each location he stopped in sold the tickets beforehand. There was the incentive of a small prize to do this. Local communities provided their community or church halls free of charge. I suspect their accommodation was also offered at a reduced rate. 

My parents, who had known Mr Raymond for years, always provided the whole concert party with a meal. I hope other people did the same thing. Any money saved went to the school. It helped. I worked weekends in the residential nursery school. It was a volunteer position too. It had to be. They were desperately short of money at times but the full time staff would sometimes, "That's a Raymond item" meaning it had been possible to buy it with money he raised.

Looking back the concerts were not very good but people went, not just to support the cause but because it was a rare night out. It wasn't the local "footy dance" which was about the only other entertainment. 

I wonder what would happen if they tried something similar now. There might be a few takers in remote areas because few people could afford to do what the young couple I know are doing. I really do hope they enjoy themselves - but I'd rather spend the money on something else.