From Pyrenees to Pennines

Bischofsbrot

The other day, apropos a post I’d written on my blog, Notes on a family, an old school friend, Gillian, sent me this message.

‘I still have your mum’s recipe for fruit cake with chunks of dark chocolate in it – to die for !’

What could she have meant? So I thought. Then I thought some more. And suddenly I remembered. Bischofsbrot.

I remembered helping my mother make this cake from time to time: not often, it was expensive. I remember chunks of chocolate, nuts, cherries, dried fruit… lots of eggs. And I wanted to make it again. Like Gillian, I liked it – a lot. I hunted through my mother’s old notebook, crammed with recipes from old friends or clipped out of the paper. Nothing doing. None of my own recipe books helped out. I turned to the net, and found a few there, but none of them seemed quite right. I settled on this one, because it was at least measured in grams rather than the dreaded cups, and here it is.

…six egg whites to be whisked to stiff peaks …

…. six egg yolks to be whisked with sugar to a pale emulsion …

…. chopped chocolate, nuts, dried fruits for the mix.

We’ve just eaten a slice each. I’m not happy. It’s nice enough, but it’s not startling me with memories of what the cake, bright with jewelled candied fruits, nuts and satisfying chunks of dark chocolate, ought to taste like.

It doesn't even look right. Not happy. — It doesn’t even look right. Not happy.

I need help. Gillian? You claim to have the recipe! Stephan over in Germany? Heidi, half-German pâtissière extraordinaire with friends who bake with you in the Clandestine Cake Club? Patty, with your German heritage? Sarah, adventurous seeker after new recipes? Someone must have the definitive version, the one that will summon up that long-forgotten taste from childhood. I can’t even get a straight story about this cake. Is it German? Or Austrian? Is it a cake for Christmas? Or something else? So many different stories. Someone must be able to put me right. Get in touch. This is becoming urgent. I want Bischofsbrot, and I want it now.

That family tree of mine

My goodness. What a can of worms I opened when I decided to research a bit of family history. Originally, I simply planned to gather together all the stories, legends, bits of fact and fiction that all families accrue around themselves and record them in my new blog ‘Notes on a family’. But then, you can get a free trial period of a fortnight on Ancestry UK, so why not take things a little further?

I think the site may have sucked me in, just as it wanted to. Sleuthing around, tracking my family through the generations has been quite a lot of (frustrating) fun. But all that’s for the other blog. Here’s where I wanted to tell you about some of the incidental stuff I’ve found.

Did you know, for instance, that the census recorders used to have to note anybody they found who could be described as:

Deaf and dumb
Blind.
Lunatic
Imbecile, feeble minded.

I remember that my mother told me that when she was a child, the use of such terms as ‘moron’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘idiot’ was quite normal and not necessarily offensive, while my father, never known for his political correctness, had no problem in winding down his car window to yell ‘cretin’ at any passing jay-walker.

One of the shocks is just how large my ‘family’ is, potentially. My grandfather was one of ten, his father one of nine. Add in their spouses, their children, and their children’s spouses and children, and sudenly you’re wondering if the person you hold a door open for at the library might be your seventh cousin, five times removed.

And then all those wonderful occupations. My grandmother’s family came from the textile districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, so whole streets full of people worked at the busy mills. But nothing as dull as ‘Mill worker‘ will do as a job description. Try these: *‘worsted spinner’; ‘overlooker, stuff factory’; ‘stuff weaver’; ‘scribbling overlooker’ (what?), ‘woollen piecer’. An entire road’s worth of houses were inhabited by people had jobs such as these. Just occasionally, someone else got thrown into the mix. ‘Lamplighter’; ‘washerwoman’; ‘Roman Catholic priest’, as well as the odd ‘domestic servant‘, a young girl of 15 to 20, usually.

I couldn’t think how to illustrate this piece. Then I remembered a couple of old family albums, full of photos I have no possible means of identifying. Let’s give them their last outing.

These are for you, Kerry.

My University assignment

Here I am, still slaving away at Blogging 101, the University of Blogging. I’m beginning to get a bit on edge when I fire up the laptop in the morning, because I know Senior Lecturer and Course Director Michelle W will have sent out yet another assignment requiring us to tweak and tinker with our blogs, and generally bring them up to scratch. I even played hooky the day before yesterday, and the day before that. Doesn’t she know I have a LIFE to lead?

However, here I am again, back in the University Libary (aka our study). Today we have to write a post. And it’s to be inspired by a blog we found yesterday, a blog new to us, which we felt moved to comment on.

I discovered Katherine Price. She can write in a way that takes me to her world, her street, her little stretch of the Thames and help me to savour with her the local trees and the daily rhythms of the birds, whether a clamour of rooks, or a solitary kingfisher streaking past. The first post I read was a bit of a hymn to staying put and not moving on, a hymn to her home in suburbia.

And it got me thinking about where I live now, and where I used to live… and the time before that… and the time before that. It reminded me of a post I wrote almost 5 years ago, and I thought it was maybe time to revisit it and re-work it.

I spent my childhood in London: population 8.5 million.

Then I went to University in Manchester: population 2.5 million.

A few years later I was living in Leeds: population 751,000.

And then we moved to Harrogate: population 76,000.

Then we went to France and I started a blog. We lived in Laroque d’Olmes with about 2,500 other people.

And now we’ve come back to England, and we live in North Stainley. This is a village whose population is about 730.

Can you see a pattern here?

Everwhere I’ve lived has seemed special at the time. I used to relish all that a big city could offer, whether the museums, cinemas, or the huge choice of shops. As I moved onwards and downwards, I remembered instead and with some horror the crowds, the dirt, the general busy-ness of the place before. Good heavens, even Laroque, not big enough to support a range of shops, much less a cinema or a swimming pool seems rather exotic compared with the facilities in North Stainley (a village hall, a church, and a pub, to be re-opened in early spring). We’ve traded cinemas for a film on Saturdays once every 6 weeks in the village hall, and shops for the chance to buy eggs from the farm not far from here. And this blog is where I often report on what we discover as we explore our local countryside .

I’ll leave you with a quiz: can you identify each of the places I’ve lived in from these images?

Manchester Town Hall: Wikimedia Commons

St. Paul’s Cathedral seen from across the Thames

A village pond at North Stainley.

Leeds Town Hall: Wikimedia Commons

Laroque d’Olmes

Harrogate: Montpellier

A post for a fellow-blogger.

I’m at university this week. The University of Blogging. This seat of learning, which has no rector, no library and confers no degrees, runs a programme regularly hosted by WordPress,and aims to bring together people who from all over the world, keen to hone their writing and presentation skills, and to help each other to Write a Better Blog.

Today’s assignment:

Publish a post you’d like your ideal audience member to read.

I’ve chosen to write for one of you. We haven’t met. We don’t live on the same continent. But we’re ‘blogging friends’ who enjoy one another’s posts and often say so. You say you like the posts I write about walking in the Yorkshire Dales. I like the posts in which you too describe your walks, often more extensive than mine, taking place over several days. You stride beside me – virtually of course – as I tramp along the leaf mould paths of a dappled English woodland. I stop to gaze across the green and undulating hills at the lattice work of ancient fields, divided by drystone walls, and share the view with you courtesy of my camera.

Except… I haven’t. Not lately. Those floods I wrote about a couple of weeks ago are an ever-present danger to some. And even for those who haven’t had flooded homes to contend with, the weekly rhythm has changed. Walking is quite simply not on. The other day, fed up with the lack of exercise, I took myself off to walk along country roads instead. I’d not been going ten minutes when I met a deep trough as wide as the road, as deep as my ankles, and as long as… well, I don’t know. It went beyond the next bend, anyhow, and I went home. The fields are home to seagulls who bob about on the choppy waters. The paths are streams. The streams are rivers. And the rivers are seas.

Quiz question. Which is the path, and which the brook?

A path through the woods.

Brian can’t wait to get home.

i) Quiz question: which is the path, and which the brook?

ii) This, I’m afraid, is a path.

iii) Brian-from-Bolton simply can’t stand getting his paws muddy. He’s urging me home – NOW.

But I’m keen to get out and about again as soon as I can. And I hope you’ll come with me, in a virtual sort of way, when I report back.

Bolton&BrianJan2015 048 — A typical field. And not half as bad as some.

Notes on a family

I’ve been writing this blog, firstly as ‘Life in Laroque‘, and later, when we returned to England, as ‘From Pyrenees to Pennines‘ for eight years now. I’m beginning to feel the ‘brand’ is becoming a little tired, and that I may no longer post quite so regularly.

But I shan’t stop writing. I’m planning to start a blog that I’ll call ‘Notes on a family‘, which will mainly be for family members to read. I can’t think it will attract many followers from further afield.

Mine is a relatively small family. As a child, I had no brothers, no sisters, no grandparents, no aunts, and only one uncle, whom I met once. Obviously then, no cousins either. I didn’t mind. I listened to my schoolfriends moaning about the torments of having a brother, how annoying their sisters were, and how embarrassing they found their Uncle Norman and Auntie Elaine, and took their comments at face value.

This makes me feel very old. It’s my mother with her younger brother. Such a period piece.

One of my regrets when my mother died was that I’d asked her so little about her family. Her father, for instance, who’d died when she was 19. He was one of 8 siblings born to a poor London family. Alone among those siblings, he was sent to Grammar School, which can’t have been at all easy. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he did exceptionally well, and became a parish priest. What’s the story there? I shall never know now.

My father too. He came from Poland during World War II. His family were well-to-do landowners at one point, but his father died when he was 12. Because his mother remarried and I don’t know what her new surname was, I have no means of tracing any family members there.

But there are leads I can follow, and I have started to do so. My new blog will not be organised chronologically. Rather I’ll tell tales as they occur to me, recount results of research when I have any successes. Here’s the first post.

Flood

December in the north of England has been the month of the flood. Until Boxing Day, it was Cumbria that saw all the action, with some communities flooded out not once, not twice, but three times. They were told to stand by for more on Boxing Day. They readied themselves…. and nothing happened, because the torrential rains prophesied swept south and east of them, firstly into Lancashire, and then Yorkshire

We were staying with my daughter’s family in that part of Greater Manchester that used to be in Lancashire. They live near a Nature Reserve through which Bradshaw Brook passes. I’d say ‘flows’, but such a phrase is normally far too active a description for this narrow little watercourse.

This was Bradshaw Brook yesterday.

ChristmasBolton2015 029 — Bradshaw Brook, Boxing Day 2015

We were due to travel home from their house to ours, in Yorkshire. Highways England, the BBC, and motoring organisations all had conflicting information on their websites. But they all agreed that our usual route, a scenic drive over the Pennines, was largely impassable.

It would have to be the motorway. Longer, duller, but surer. We’d not long been travelling when we noticed that traffic on the other carriageway was at a complete standstill, for miles…and miles. It was only when we got home that we found out that a 20′ sinkhole had opened up near Rochdale. So much for safer-by-motorway…..

Where to leave the motorway though, for the final few miles home? There were floods in Leeds, floods near Harrogate – there were sure to be floods in Boroughbridge too. What about Knaresborough? It turned out there were floods near there too, as we discovered when warning notices turned us back on the road we’d come on, and sent us back by several miles to look for another route. Familiar fields had turned into lakes, deep and almost unfordable road-side puddles were unavoidable.

ChristmasBolton2015 045 — This doesn’t look too bad. Trust me. It’s deep.

We’re lucky. We were flood-tourists on our journey home, gawping at rivers-become-seas, and roads-become-rivers. Our home wasn’t flooded, nor will it be. Others aren’t so fortunate. They’re either contemplating the devastation of their own home or business – or both, or anxiously shoring up the front door with as many sandbags as they can lay their hands on, in anticipation of the days ahead, when the forecast continues to be grim. We could all do with a bit of an old-fashioned winter cold snap, with a touch of frost, but positively no rain.

FASR&Ripon27Dec2015 025 — You see that bridge, centre left? That’s a bridge over the River Ure, in Ripon. This lake in the foreground is not a lake, but open ground at the edge of the city, favoured by dog-walkers and children.

‘Deck the halls…’ at Castle Howard

CastleHowardChristmas2015 078 — Castle Howard at Christmas time.

You all know Castle Howard, that magnificent 18th century stately home, and one of Yorkshire’s treasures. I’ve even blogged about it. It provides the backdrops in endless films and TV dramas.

This time, though, as it’s Christmas, I just want to show you how its been decorated for the season. A few weeks ago they shut the doors for a whole fortnight, and everyone from groundsmen and gardeners to guides and caretaking staff turned to and spent their time dragging trees into place, painting, placing baubles, candles and foliage, gilding, and generally making the place festive. Then they re-opened. We came away from our afternoon there, admiring everyone’s hard work and enthusiasm, feeling Christmassy for the first time this year. Happy Christmas everyone!

Sunrise on the Winter Solstice

North Stainley, Ripon, 21st December 2015

‘Tuesday’s Tune’

Soon after I started writing my blog, I realised that some of the people reading my posts were … other bloggers. They comment on my posts, and I on theirs. It’s a novel kind of ‘friendship’. We’re unlikely ever to meet, and yet we come to know one another (or those bits of ourselves we’re willing to share in print) quite well. We like and support one another. Not for us the mean-spirited and negative comments that seem to be a feature of the comment columns on many national newspapers, thank you very much.

Even more extraordinary is the fact that these blogging friends live all over the world: in Canada, in America, in France, in Germany. And this week, one of those blogging friends, Clay Watkins: Making the Days Count has asked me to contribute a guest post to his blog.

Clay is a teacher. He’s the teacher you wish you’d had at school: keen to make his students enthusiastic for the project in hand. Whether it’s looking at the skies, or the aftermath of the Second World War, or the principles of physics, Clay wants you to be curious, so you do your very best. He likes music too, and so once a week on his blog, it’s ‘Tuesday’s tune’. Have a look here, and see what I chose to write about on his blog.

An afternoon of no peace… but a lot of good will: a carol service at Fountains Abbey

If the National Trust property where you volunteer has an abbey on site, albeit a ruined one, that’s where a good few of the Christmas celebrations need to take place. It’s fair to say that there are many people locally who regard a chance to hear singing from a local choir at one of the ‘Music and Lights’ events, or at the carol service here, as one of the focal points of their pre-Christmas celebrations.

The Abbey hasn’t had a roof since Henry VIII’s men came and removed it. Only the cellarium, which the monks used for storage, specifically for vast quantities of valuable woollen fleeces, is still under cover. It’s a little draughty too, as the windows remain unglazed, but the acoustics are amazing. The monks who used to call the abbey home might be rather surprised to find that their storage facility is nowadays, from time to time, a concert hall.

Picture the scene before the service began. Here’s the cellarium at 1.30 p.m.

FASRMusic&LightsDec15 048 — The cellarium, empty at 1.30 p.m.

For two hours after that, though, there was a batallion of volunteers, with a couple of members of staff cheerfully mucking in to transform the place. Some of us hauled ranks and ranks of folding chairs out from storage and arranged them neatly. Some protected scores of candles with little cardboard collars so nobody would be burnt by molten wax when the time came to light them during the service. Others uncoiled lengthy snakes of cable for the sound and lighting systems. And the largest team of all arranged the refreshments: coffee, tea, hot chocolate, mulled wine.

By 3 o’clock. members of the public were already choosing their seats, and the refreshment stand was very much in business. ‘One coffee, two teas and four mulled wines please!’ ‘Two hot chocolates, a mulled wine and a coffee’. On and on we worked. Suddenly, someone said she thought she could hear ‘Oh come all ye faithful’ in the distance. The service had long since begun, and we’d been too busy to notice.

FASRMusic&LightsDec15 057

The carol service continued, service of refreshments continued. By half past 4, things finally started to quieten down as the event drew to a close. Time for the team to snatch a refreshment break, and do a little accounting. We’d sold far more than £1000 worth of hot drinks, including 66 bottles-worth of mulled wine. Not bad for a couple of hours’ hard graft. And as the congregation proved willing to do a whole lot of chair shifting, clearing up didn’t take too long.

Even if we didn’t hear many carols, we felt we’d had a good start to the Christmas season. It hadn’t been very peaceful, but there had been plenty of cheerful good will from staff, volunteers and visitors alike.

And meanwhile, up at the entrance to Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal, two other volunteers had been busy. Here’s Sharon, Volunteer Elf, welcoming visitors to meet Father Christmas – a volunteer, of course. FASRMusic&LightsDec15 003