The Joy of Being an Old Shoe

Today I taught writing. One of my students objected to my suggestion he send his best story to a contest, saying slyly that I had said romance was out of fashion. He had inadvertently written a rather brilliant scene in which a wife locks herself in the bedroom to save her husband from catching the plague from which she will shortly die. 

"That's not exactly romance," I said. "That's one of the funny things about marriage."

And then I laughed because one of the funny things about marriage is that, after a point, it isn't really romantic, except once in awhile, or in unusual circumstances. If you're both happy, it's better than romance. It's like finding your other shoe when you are already wearing one shoe. 

Update: I admit that there are better similes for this. It's more like being trees side-by-side in a forest. 

The Joy of Apple Jelly

One of the problems with reporting on the Saddest News in the World is that it very often makes me sad, and sometimes it gives me nightmares, so even sleep is not always a relief. However, there are people who manage to stay joyful and calm even in the worst circumstances, and I want to be one of them. Thus, to help towards this goal, I will try to write a joyful thing a day. 

Today's joyful thing is that my apple jelly has set. I have never made apple jelly before, and it was a long time ago that I last made jelly. That was at my parents' house, where jam and jelly making is an ordinary thing. My mother made red currant jelly just last month. 

When I was a child, we lived in a house with a pear tree in the garden. For some years, my parents ordered us all out of the kitchen, affixed a baby gate to the doorway and made jars and jars of pear jam. I got very bored with pear jam, but of course now I go into transports whenever I taste something that reminds me of it. 

Yesterday I chopped up 2 kilos of apples, cooked them in 1.25 litres of water, and left them to drip in a muslin-covered plastic colander set over a cooling rack set over a bowl. This got me about 5.5 cups of juice to boil down into jelly this morning.  I added 115 g of sugar and as much lemon juice as I could squeeze out of a lemon. As I could not get the recommended 2 Tbsps out of it, I threw half the lemon peel to boil along for awhile. 

I bought a candy thermometer from Hobby Craft yesterday evening ("Made in China"--alas), which was necessary to see that it really does take a long time for apple-juice-and-sugar to reach 220 F.  It may have taken 45 minutes, and I had to watch the pot carefully to make sure it didn't boil over. At one point it did boil over, sadly, but I managed to clean up the mess quickly. Meanwhile, I kept dripping boiling juice hopefully into a glass of cold water, looking for threads, and onto a cold plate, looking for gel. 

When the apple juice finally gelled on the cold plate, I was delighted. I turned off the heat, put on oven mitts and filled 5 sterilised jars with hot, red-gold jelly. Obeying the British recipe, I put circles of baking parchment on four of them, screwed down the lids and, lacking cellophane, sealed them extra-shut with sellotape. The fifth jar was only half-full, so we will eat it up first. 

One of the wonderful things about apples is that they are so full of pectin, you don't need to buy any pectin to make apple jelly. And now that I have made our first batch of ordinary jelly, I will experiment by making other jellies with our apples. Next week B.A. and I will collect brambles (blackberries) from the bushes. According to tradition, brambles have to be picked before St. Michael's Day. On St. Michael's Day the devil spits on them or rolls about on them peevishly or carries out some other petty and vengeful act upon them.  

The Best Thing That Happened to Me All Day

"I really enjoyed reading Seraphic Singles when I was in college. It seemed like the one place I could go for humor, sanity, and wisdom on what it meant to be a single Catholic woman. You helped me conform my expectations to reality. Thanks for your pithy and humorous writing!"

Man, I needed that. What a kind young lady.

Apple Cider Day 2020

Our tree denuded of 180 apples.

This year we picked about 180 apples on Saturday, September 5 and turned them into juice for cider. I also took some photographs. Sadly I thought about photographs only after I had finished climbing about in the tree yelling "I'm a monkey."

After collecting our first 130 apples, we popped them into the bathtub for washing and then took them to the kitchen for chopping and mincing. This year this laborious stage was easier because we now have two wooden cutting boards and I got a friend's never-used big food processor out of the shed to add to our little one. Shortly after noon we had filled every large bowl and pot within reach.  

And then, because it was a nice day, Benedict Ambrose carried the fruit press into the garden and bolted it to a wooden pallet. We then began to press the minced apples, attracting the interested gazes of our neighbours, who eventually came outside to see what we were doing.

Chopped and minced.

I was hoping very much for 10 litres of juice from the 130 apples, but as time went on and the fermenting bin filled but slowly, I collected another 50 or so apples and took them indoors for chopping and mincing. In the end, we got just under 11 litres of juice. 

Then there was a large fuss as I tore the flat apart looking for the Campden tablets. Campden tablets kill any nasty bacteria that has got into the juice plus, unfortunately, the natural yeast on the apples. Technically the Campden tablets are optional, but I am always unconvinced that we have been careful enough about touching the juice only with sterilised stuff. Finally B.A. found the Campden tablets on the microwave oven, beside the eggs (see above).

Nectar of the apple gods.

This year I wore plastic gloves, rinsed the spoons with which I crushed the corrosive Campden tables and washed my hands. 

Meanwhile B.A. and I had opened our two last bottles of 2019 cider. One was drinkable, and one wasn't. We think they were from two different batches that got mixed up since both batches went in identical bottles and later got move around. 

Naturally, we hope all the cider from 2020 will be drinkable. I always worry about it because we never obey the "put your cider in a warm cupboard" instruction because we don't have a warm cupboard in September. Ironically we could have a warm cupboard in November when we turn on the bathroom radiator. However, there it is. I put the fermenting bin on the lowest shelf of the bathroom cupboard to "warm up" for 24 hours. 

In reality it "warmed up" for 48 hours, for we went away on Sunday morning and didn't return until Monday evening. I then sterilised an alcohol measurer, two small spoons and a big spoon, took a juice sample, put in 20 drops of pectinase to break down the little bits of minced apple, scattered over cider yeast, crushed 4 vitamin tablets and chucked them in, and gave it all a good stir with the big spoon. Then I put the fermenting bin back in the cupboard, and next Wednesday, if all goes well, we will rack the cider, which means to put it in demijohns for the next stage. We have two 5 litre demijohns.

For some reason our cider is a lot more variable than B.A's elderflower champagne. B.A. doesn't sterilise anything* for his elderflower champagne, and yet it always turns out amazing. Our cider seems to change from bottle to bottle, which is most aggravating.

This is our third September in this flat and thus our third attempt at making cider. This year B.A. was tired after his cider endeavours but not too exhausted to see the pressing to the end. The first year B.A. was still recovering from extreme radiotherapy and the second year...he was still recovering from extreme radiotherapy. But here we are three years later, and he is strong enough to chop, mince and squish 180 apples with me in one day. 

That said, he doesn't want to do it again this year, so I will be harvesting the rest of our apples for pie filling and jelly. I haven't made apple jelly before, but it seems like a worthy project. Apple jelly is a good base for other jellies, too, so we will pick a lot of brambles, too.

*B.A. says he now sterilises the bottles and the fermentation bin for the elderflower champagne, and before he used "hot soapy water". Huh.

Building Resilience

A restful hotel room in Kraków

Good morning, faithful readers!

Where have I been, you ask? I have been off doing a partial internet detox, which means filling my morning hours before work with therapeutic reading, language study, and pedalling away on our stationary bike, which is now set up in the kitchen. This way, when I begin work around 10 AM, I have not already been stewing my brains in the internet for two or three hours.

I still sit around too much, but I've decided to work on that.

One of the problems with being addicted to the internet---the never ending stream of information, opinions, news items, laughs, shocks and alarms---is that it eventually fills me with rage and self-disgust. Hours and hours go by, wasted.

One of the worst aspects of words-on-screen is that they are harder to remember than words-on-page. Now when I'm writing a complicated story for work, I print out first source material so that I can actually read it and check it over and over again if need be.

That is why, after I wash the dishes in the morning, the first thing I do is read a chapter of a Real Book. Since returning from Poland, my Real Books have been James Clear's Atomic Habits and Rick Hanson's Resilient. I highly recommend both.

Happily for me, I took Resilient with us to Poland, so I learned about absorbing pleasant experiences for later use while still on holiday. In stressful moments in the past two weeks, I have been able to regain equilibrium by imagining myself back in Polish Pretend Daughter-in-Law's hotel room in the countryside, looking at the sunny, green lawn where my husband was sitting with a book, watching golfers hit balls into the pond. Ahhh...

Another lesson from Resilient is that human beings need safety, satisfaction, and connection with others to feel happy. Safety can mean a roof over your head, satisfaction a job well done, and connection simply remembering how much someone loves you. I woke up one day last week full of dread about something, and so I began to list off things I was grateful for--our home, our savings, the apple tree, everyone in my family is in good health--and the dread went away.

Resilient cost £12.99 because I bought it new at a real bookshop, and this was much less expensive than a single session with a therapist. Benedict Ambrose, alarmed by my rage and self-disgust, had begun to suggest I see a therapist.  Poor BA was trying to be a therapist by telling me that although some thing or situation (like a typo in an article I had submitted) felt like an enormity, it wasn't really.

So hooray for popular psychology books, structured activities, and the exercise bike. But now I must go for today is cider-making day. I shall let you know how that went anon.

Just Terribly Busy

So you know.

Carrots and Cats

Today I planted carrots, reasonably confident that the carrot fly season is over.  The broad bean season is over too, and I must say that there was no point letting them get big enough to shell. The actual broad beans turned out to be tiny whereas the young pods were quite delicious.

I had hopes of convincing Polish Pretend Son to build a walled garden, but after a day in the August heat, I realised that, as cold as it gets in winter, Poland has no need of walled gardens. It's cold and rainy Britain that needs the walled gardens. No wonder ours are famous--if only among ourselves.

One of the most cheerful sights in the Polish countryside was a brightly coloured village garden with lots of flowers and neat rows of vegetables. We didn't see any horses--just the two ponies outside the living country museum (one looking suspiciously like a Welsh Mountain Pony)--but we saw a few slim cats slinking around.  Naturally many of the village houses had dogs, and some even had signs warning "Bad dog." I don't think Scottish dog owners are so honest about their pets.

Naturally the dogs barked up a story as we walked by on our epic walk to Polish Pretend Daughter's rehearsal two villages over.

"Another burek (mutt)," Polish Pretend Son observed.

 There were also many chickens and ducks, but now I must eat supper.