Fiori di Zucca 2

Today I fried up five fiori di zucca (recipe here, only we had anchovies instead of capers), some cucumber and the leftover anchovies. At the last moment, I remembered to take a photograph. (The object on the right is a stuffed zucchini blossom.)

It really was the taste of Rome. I didn't even like anchovies until we discovered fiori di zucca in Rome.

The plan, going forward, is to eat the blossoms the day they first bloom. They don't stay that big for very long. The thing to do is to have mozzarella, anchovies and mint to hand from mid to late June.

In other gardening news, the last runner bean has emerged from the soil of the trug and so have the pea shoots. To save them from the ghastly greenfly, I have put plastic pop-bottle cloches over them. One of the second-sowing radishes in the raised bed was ready, so I popped it out, gave it a scrub, cut off the greens for later and ate it.

The radishes are very small, and I think after a year or two of learning from trial and error I will attempt to grow big vegetables like the best-in-show type vegetable growers. I am not a great radish fan, preferring the green tops, to be honest, so perhaps I'll concentrate on bean production, or something like that. It would be lovely to have enough green beans for us to eat a handful every day.

Next year I may also splash out on a greenhouse because I am longing to try tomatoes and aubergines (eggplants). We eat a lot of tomatoes, and even though, yes, the canned Italian variety cost only 35 p a can, it would be marvellous to have delicious Calabrese salads.

Fiori di Zucca

The courgettes (zucchini) are flourishing--that is, the flowers are. Therefore, tomorrow I will be picking the male flowers, stuffing them with mozzarella and anchovies, dipping them in batter and frying them in oil. This is one of my favourite dishes, so I hope tomorrow isn't too late!

Here is a lovely photograph from our Saturday walk around the Historical House. We ran for a familiar old shelter just in time not to get drenched.

The Zoom Reunion

It has been many years since I graduated from high school. My body has thickened, and my face is melting. However, such is the lot of women who live past forty as was impressed upon me yesterday by the sight of over a dozen old classmates on my computer last night.

It was supposed to be an online cocktail party; I drank a little too much red wine instead.

"Did you talk about the faith?" asked Benedict Ambrose, or words to that effect.

"Goodness gracious, no. We talked about where we all lived now, children, Sr. W's matching red-white-and-blue outfits, D being pregnant the year we graduated, V's arranged marriage and how she is now, how M likes living in Dubai, how at least of two of them were bullies, and which girl had had a baby with another girl, which I don't think is true, actually."

That is a reconstructed statement, to be honest, as I am not sure what I exactly said to B.A., having drunk too much wine. I think what inspired that was one of the women still living in the principal Italian-Canadian neighbourhood asking a woman with an Italian married name what part of Italy her husband was from. Nothing brought back my school days like that. Reminiscing about hairspray and the Dep brand of gel carried only faint shadows of feeling like an outsider.

Hey, paesana! Hey, chica! Come stai, ha? Oh, okay, you know? Hey, Carmela, what part of Italy are you from? Calabria? Yeah? Cosenza?

That said, this may have been the exact same woman who asked me how my husband was doing, which strongly suggested that she or her parents were still reading the Toronto Catholic Register in 2017. That was very kind, and the closest we got to what B.A. was hoping for. He was so indignant that my graduating class, despite having gone to a convent school (so to speak) and taught by nuns, were so uninterested in Catholic topics that I ran away back to my computer to send a message to my prom date, who was and still is a practising Catholic.

I noticed that the women who had been quiet, studious girls, didn't attempt to get a word in edgewise, and that the women who had been great at sports and parties did most of the talking. My own set of outsiders--some of whom had been bullied by the girls some of these women used to be--were not there. I was moved, however, that the former bullies remembered their principal victims and asked after them.

Memories were shaky and information shared--including by me--unreliable. Someone suggested X and Y had had a baby together, but someone else said that Y was married to a man. I said that Q was in Colorado, but today I see that she is in Toronto.

Someone said that 1 in 10 of us must have been gay, but that we didn't even talk about such things back then. I thought privately that possibly 1 in 100 of us was deep-seatedly same-sex attracted and that we certainly did talk about such things back then. For one thing, all my schoolmates were collectively called "The Lezzies of [School]" by outsiders, and for another there were rumours that two girls had been caught kissing in the washroom/behind a shed/in the art room, etc. I myself entered the school with a massive crush on an older girl that was soon replaced by a massive crush on a boy at my brother's school. Adolescence is complicated.

Occasionally a child or photograph of children showed up on the screen and at one point a computer was taken outside where a man was barbecuing. It looked as thought we had mostly turned out the way I always suspected the school meant us to: university-educated or at least married to university-educated men, with at least two children (but not more than four), employed or at least married to employed men, with suburban houses and back yards, and the school cheer still resounding somewhere in the back of our middle-class minds. This was not the life I thought I wanted, and (as you see) this is not the life I have.

I found the reunion profoundly interesting and yet disturbing, and I was thankful afterwards that for once my best practising Catholic female friend, mother of my Canadian god-daughter, picked up the phone. Lily (as I call her online) is one of the few people outside my family to whom that I can sincerely say, "I love you so much, and I think you are fabulously beautiful."

To tell the truth, though, my family is not given to enthusiastic use of the L-word. We fight back tears at our weddings and funerals instead and occasionally harangue each other about losing weight/quitting stressful jobs/not risking dying alone of Covid-19. So thank heavens for my quiet American ex-pat Lily, locked down in a downtown house with a handsome, clever husband and four beautiful, clever children. (The fifth won't emerge fully on the scene until later this year.)

With Lily I can talk about the faith and society and American politics and everything under the sun without a shadow of reticence or fear, and with her children I can be both a gift-giving aunt and a hideous monster that drags them along the floor before gobbling them up.  And so I do not begrudge similar friendships among the old classmates I saw last night: I think its wonderful and hopeful that they last so long.

Lily and I talked until I was sober enough to picture the phone bill, and then I went to bed.

Update: B.A. doesn't think that anyone on last night's call would be thrilled if they read this description, so I apologise in advance. I do think the reunion was a great idea.  Yes, I felt "on the margins" of the conversation, just as I felt awkward around many of the conversations at school. As for the reconstructed "Hey, Carmela" conversation, I understand the factors that led to close knit Italian-Canadian communities, and I don't begrudge the members their membership. At any rate, I will have an interesting conversation about all this with my non-Canadian Italian tutor this evening.

My Brilliant Financial Advice

When I was working in a Canadian government office, lo, twenty years ago, I was given the first piece of serious financial advice that I ever remember receiving. It wasn't very good, as it was merely "Never buy a home because then you'll be trapped!" The giver of this advice was a Scottish immigrant to Canada who very much disliked our job and wanted to quit but could not because of her mortgage.

Personally, I love our mortgage. I was going to say it's a child-substitute, but that would add a note of unintended melancholy. Having run out of Polish graduate students, I have made the vegetables my child-substitute. The mortgage is more of a sport. The object of the sport is to save up as much as much as possible to put down the biggest allowable annual overpayment on the mortgage, thus making monthly mortgage payments smaller. It's like golf--the smaller the number is, the better our game.

One of the reasons that I love the mortgage is that it represents Benedict Ambrose's and my successful, if rather late, rooting in financial reality. Before I returned to full-time employment, we were advised that Benedict Ambrose alone should apply for a mortgage, for as a freelancer I would significantly lower the sum the bank would grant us. This was the principal reason why, after B.A.'s first life-saving operation, I seized upon the first full-time writing job I thought I was at all likely to get. This meant that my salary, too, would be factored in by the banks.

Our principal dread was that we would be thrown out of the Historical House and into the rental market, where B.A. was adamant he did not want us to be. Therefore, we began to save, and kept on saving when I got a job and when B.A. was deathly ill. When his sick pay ran out, I cut my expenses. We continued to put all our savings into a first-time buyers' "Help to Buy" Investment Savings Account (ISA).

This proved to have been the canniest thing we ever did because when we were thrown out of the Historical House, we had enough saved, and we were earning enough, to get the mortgage that enabled us to buy a two bedroom flat in a safe and convenient, if humble, neighbourhood. Needless to say, we do not feel trapped. We feel very fortunate, doubly fortunate that this flat has a private garden instead of the usual shared "[laundry] drying green".

This is not to say I have not cried a tear or two of regret over the many years I did not work full-time and did not save. When I scan past decades, my greatest financial regret is that I did not save 50% of everything I ever earned and put it into some investment vehicle that returned even just 3%. If I had done that, we would not be living in Safebuthumblehood but in Edinburgh's New Town.

I had some inkling of the importance of saving and investing young when I was in my late twenties, but I basically forgot it to pursue my dreamy-dreams. Then, the summer we bought our flat, I came across a book in the Stockbridge Public Library called The Escape Artist. It was a life changer, not  because it explained how someone could retire before 40, but because its principles work for over-40s wanting to retire before 80.

The interesting thing about the concept of the millionaire is that many, many, many employees earn over a million pounds or dollars during their work lives, but they aren't millionaires at the end. They aren't millionaires because, of course, they have spent the money. Much of this spending is absolutely necessary: taxes, shelter, food, heating, electricity, work clothes, medical insurance or fees. However, much of it really isn't. Financial Independence for Early Retirement (FIRE) people are brutal about automobiles, and Mr. Money Mustache, for example, is a great fan of bicycles. My maternal grandfather rode a bicycle to work. B.A.'s maternal grandfather walked to work. FIRE people are also  brutal about restaurants, which are a greater temptation to Mr and Mrs B.A. than cars.

When scanning past decades to see where my earnings disappeared, I inevitably conclude that Life Happens and that the inner flame lit by going out for sushi with my richer classmates after evening theology lectures was worth the money.  All the same, I think the very wisest thing a young person can do, after leaving college or university without debts, is to work as hard and earn as much as possible, living as cheaply as possible, for five years. All savings should be invested as cheaply (look out for bank or brokers' fees) as possible, taking into account your comfort with risk, as obviously some investments are safer bets than others. If the young person was able to save £/$20,000 a year, in five years he or she would have £/$100,000 plus whatever interest they had earned.

To put this into perspective, a full-time Starbucks employee in Canada seems to make about $26,000 a year. The lowest annual wage I've seen for a farm hand in Vermont is over $27,000. I am deliberately choosing low-paying jobs here. Have a look for likely salaries for American college graduates here.

Ideally, my hard-working young person gets along well enough with his or her parent/s to continue living with them as he or she grows his or her £/$100,000+ nest egg. If the parent/s wants a financial contribution to household bills, etc., then better the money goes to family than a stranger. Richer parents may just be impressed by their offspring's canny financial goal and cheer him or her on.

This initial $/£100,000 is a form of financial insurance against life's little difficulties. Even in a so-called "high-interest" savings account, it will grow all by itself over time. As traditional Catholics very often marry young, I suppose they would gladly spend it on real estate. However, I initially formulated this plan for young men hoping to become diocesan priests.

As a journalist, I keep coming across stories about young priests who are abused in a myriad of ways by bad or badly advised bishops. One of the problems is that bishops have enormous power over their priests, including financial. Another problem is that bishops die, and the good bishop who is a loving father to his young priests may be replaced by a serial sex pest or anti-trad ideologue. No matter how much money the priest has invested, he will still have a lot of sorrow, but at least he will not be completely financially dependent on his bishop.

Fictional example

Young Stan Kowalski is a whizz with computers but suspects he has a vocation to the priesthood. His parents, though devout, beg him to go to college and maybe work a few years before going to seminary. So Stan puts his head down, gets a degree in computer science by age 21, continues living with his parents and saves most of his $60,000/a salary. The day he has $100,000 nicely invested in something safe but steady, he calls Bishop Saintly's vocation director. He is now 23.

Young Stan goes to the diocesan seminary and is ordained to the diaconate at age 29 and then to the priesthood. He loves good Bishop Saintly and his parishioners, and his bishop and parishioners love him. Sometimes Fr. Stan feels uneasy that he has this great sum in index funds, snowballing away at 7%, but his parents have assured him that they will kill him if he tries to give it away to the poor. So instead Fr. Stan gives the poor almost all of his salary, saving only $100 a month to give to his mother. His mother promptly puts it into his index funds.

Then disaster. Bishop Saintly, whose traditionalism has put him into no little conflict with people who wish to sing a new church into being, has a heart attack and dies. Fr Stan, now 39, says a Traditional Latin Requiem Mass for his beloved ghostly father within the hour and weeps at the official funeral.

Then second disaster. Bishop Eric McTed is appointed to the diocese. Whereas Fr Stan is now too old to be of particular interest to the notorious "Uncle" McTed, the new bishop is keen to sing a new church into being. And just as you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you can't establish the New Pentecost without throwing an orthodox priest or two into the diocesan funny farm.  And balding Fr. Stan, who is known to say the TLM for a stable group, to serve a flourishing society of rigidly orthodox young people, and to lead rosaries outside the local PP, looks just like the egg that has to be broke.

A faithful priest, even one with no political talents, can be hard to crack, though. Indeed, it is two more years before Fr. Stan comes to the attention of a Marxist identitarian group, and one more before their campaign against him leads to what the parish still calls The Homily That Did For Him. It gets 50,000 hits on YouTube.

"But I don't want to go to St Dymphna's," says Fr. Stan to Bishop McTed over the phone. "I'm not unhappy. I'm not sick. I didn't say anything that was uncharitable. I didn't say anything that was untrue."

"I want you out in six hours," says Bishop McTed, scratching his pointed tail.

"He wants me out in six hours," Fr. Stan tells his aged parents over Skype.

"What a lucky thing you have $265, 919.21 in your index fund," says his mother.

"If you live frugally, you'll be able to live on the interest alone for the rest of your life," says his father.

"But what about my ministry?" wails Fr. Stan.

"Well, I guess you follow the canonical procedures," says his mother. "Meanwhile, your Auntie Mary says Bishop Goodman over in Wisconsin is a saint."

By the way, if you think you recognise Fr. Stan, you are wrong; his woes are a composite of the kind of woes traditional young priests risk these days. When I was a child, I never dreamed men like a certain former archbishop of Washington (or another of Milwaukee) existed, let alone could ever become priests. I wish there was something more I could do about it.

I May Have to Return to Writing for Singles

People. I'm supposed to be working, but I got led down a Twitter rabbit hole.

People.

People, people, people. By whom I mean Trads. Men Trads.

This is not how you write personal ads.

YARG! If you are looking for a wife on a site called Traditional [or Traditional Catholic] Singles, you do NOT have to spell out that your future wife is not going to use birth control. What you DO have to spell out, at once, is what you do for a living.

Let's think "traditional" here. Traditionally (and also on Traditional Catholic Singles), men look for pretty, good-tempered, charming women to make their domestic lives nice, have their children, and be a good companion on the weekends they're not out with the boys. Traditionally, women look for men who can pay for all that. 

So the first thing I want to see after "Hi, I'm Bill, 31, from St. Ouain-Ouain, Quebec" is "I'm a software engineer/forest ranger/managerial trainee/firefighter/dentistry student/market gardener."

A dating profile is an ADVERTISEMENT. The whole point of advertising is to SELL something, and in this case you are selling the idea that you are a good catch. What would make you a good catch to a 50 year old millionairess is not what would make you a good catch to a 20-something traditional girl who wants a home, garden, children and flock of hens.

Men who want "traditional Catholic" women had better prove up front that they are "traditional Catholic" men. Unless the Traditional Catholic Single Man is a university professor,  Traditional Catholic Single Woman doesn't want to read all about his theological interests--at least, not yet.  Theological interests don't get Suzie Catholic her home, garden, children or chickens. I have an M.Div., so I know what I'm talking about.

Traditionally Catholic men wanting to get married generally left theology to their priest pals and got on with work.

Incidentally, anyone who thinks women should wear skirts 24/7 (I'm including nightgowns) and then has a seizure because such women prefer men who make enough money to support a large family is a fool not a good catch.

In short, if you want to have a really catchy personal ad, make sure you say up front and fast what you do for a living and what you will be able to offer the woman who consents to be your wife.

Example

Mike, 30,  from Craighart, Scotland. Hello, I'm a research chemist for one of the UK's largest pharmaceutical firms.  I'm the second of five siblings. I hope some day to have children myself, but I'm open to whatever number God sends--one, five, ten, whatever. I'm renting a flat with some pals while I save up enough for a deposit on a house. My dream is to live in a big farmhouse in the countryside one day with my wife and children. My interests are metal-detecting, archaeology and football. My pals and I play five-a-side every few weeks.   

Unfortunately I don't trust the local Catholic school system, so I'm looking for a university-educated woman who will homeschool our future children. If my wife wants to work once the kids have graduated, that's cool with me. My feeling is that my wife shouldn't HAVE to work, but if she wants to when the children grow up, that's fine.  I'm not open to adopting/fostering, just so that's out there. I go to the local SSPX chapel for Mass, and I help serve Mass and set up for retreats, so that's also a non-negotiable. That said, I'm interested in meeting girls who currently go to other Latin Masses, too! 

End of. Going on about headship and skirts and age difference and all that stuff is just dumb. When you apply for jobs, you don't tell the company what it can do for you but what you can do for the company. I strongly suggest the same here.

Update: I added the "bad news" in the second paragraph--no adoption--because it's need-to-know but also off-putting to some girls. Maybe many girls, although women under 30 won't be too worried about that yet. But don't put any hint at a possible heartache in the first paragraph.

Update 2: Healthy traditionally masculine interests and friendships are attractive and suggest you are "normal", so into the first paragraph they go.

Mediterranean Weather

I had no writing duties on Wednesday, so Benedict Ambrose and I carved out some time for a long country walk. The sun poured down. It was so warm, he actually wore a Panama hat instead of opting for first degree burns. We started at one of our favourite places--a rural patisserie--and walked some distance to a village with an eleventh century church. It was once a pilgrimage site, and we read the signage across the road with interest. Apparently suffragettes came along and set fire to it in 1912 or so. Everything but the stone (local red sandstone) was destroyed. Fortunately the obsession with Gothic Revival wasn't over yet, so the knighted architect employed to fix it did a good job.

The church is in a small village with heartbreakingly beautiful houses and decent if homely modern houses added on. The views of the variegated fields and hills were breathtaking. We thought about following the road to the sea but our planned route was a circular one, so we opted to look more closely at the village and to finish our circuit of the area. 

There was not much to see in the village but houses and gardens and a red postbox. After a rest on a strip of grass by the main road (the sun was really beating down), we walked onward through a wood and saw, to our left, a stable block so grand and Palladian I took it for the local manor. The local manor is a 19th century castle, now turned into charming apartments. There were also farmhouses and what must have been the castle's old kitchen garden, the wall perfectly intact. 

It was a long walk back to the bus stop, especially in all that heat. However, we continued on along over two bridges and then along a burn and then through fields, taking a last rest by a dungheap, which was not as terrible as it sounds. Then, checking the time, we strode on and at last saw, from the top of the hill, the village from which we would take a bus homeward. 

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and, as usual, one of us checked property prices when we were snug in our own sitting-room. When I was thoroughly rested, I went outside and picked off the horrible aphids (greenfly, really) from my vegetables by hand. I read somewhere that you can vacuum them off, too, and as we have a handheld DustBuster, I will indeed try that. 

Yesterday I was at my desk from 10 to 6, so there were no grand walks. By the late afternoon it was positively hot, though, so when I left my desk we went for a modest walk to the Firth of Forth and even ambled along the beach. As our beach actually has sand, it felt almost like being on the Mediterranean. As we are relatively remote, the beach wasn't crowded either. There was definite social-distancing going on. 

So that's two absolutely glorious June days in a row, tempting me into thinking perhaps tomatoes can grow outside in Scotland after all.  

Speaking of gardening, B.A. put out sliced cucumber in an aluminium tray in the veg trug in the hopes of annoying the greenfly thereby. It's all very hands-on learning, this gardening wheeze. Next year I will plant a border of "companion plants" to fend off the greenfly in the trug and sink beer traps  in the raised bed to drown the slugs. 

Garden Glory

Last night I was feeling overly furious about a minor mistake, and so I rushed out into the garden. I leaned over the vegetable trug to see if the peas had sprouted, for sprouts are high on my list of things-that-make-me-happy. No pea sprouts as yet.

However, this morning I went outside on my slug hunt and discovered one great beautiful blossom:

"Squash blossom," I cried and went back in for my actual camera. I still haven't figured out why my MacBook is feuding with its kinsdevice, the iPhone.

Here are three more photos of vegetables and one of fruit:

Slug-chewed lettuce in the raised bed.

Broad beans, kale, chard, beets, lettuce, runner beans.

Aphid-chewed runner beans, sleeping peas.

Cider babies.