Archive for the 'UK' Category

Regular Fusion View reader and commenter, Melanie, sent me some pictures of the effect of the freezing fog on the trees and bushes in the woods near her house in Hertfordshire. They are so eerily beautiful, I had to share them with you.

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Photos: copyright Melanie Crowe 2006

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In contrast to the tropical weather that we’ve been having, this week fog and frost have settled in at last in these few days before Xmas. We walked home last night after a drinks party at one of our neighbours’ house and the street was very quiet and dark, with bare trees overhanging. The fog clung to everything and gave the street lights a yellowish halo. It was all marvellously spooky!

It now feels much more as Xmas should - with red noses from the cold and everyone wrapped up like Michelin men in scarves and winter woolies and bobble hats. In the morning, the grass is crunchy underfoot from the frost.

This is a short post as I have two weeks holiday from my day job starting from the end of today and I shall be cosy-ed up at home with lots of yummy food, good books I haven’t yet had a chance to read, chocolate and red wine and port for fortification against the bleak (-ish) mid winter - and I’m so distracted by the thought of all these goodies, I can’t think of anything profound to write today!

Happy holiday season, all!

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It will be all quiet at Fusion View over the holiday season and I will be back with new posts from Monday 8 Jan 2007. So see you in a couple of weeks!

Photo: thanks to gonwalkabout.info

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In the northern hemisphere, the Xmas cards that have been whizzing around this time of year invariably show scenes of snow and icy merriment.

Well, in reality, this year has been astonishingly warm in London. Normally, I would be wrapped in my ski jacket or in several layers of winter woolies. This year all I need is a light jacket over a thin blouse. And even so, when I pick up speed as I charge around town, I start to get hot and sweaty and have to start stripping off.

The other morning, as I was having breakfast, I noticed a red rose blooming in my garden. What?! In the middle of December?

This might have been an amazing omen if I lived in another era. But these days, with global warming in the news every day, I find my marvel and joy somewhat dulled by doom and gloom…

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We’ve been having a great discussion about language and identity on Fusion View recently, with a number of comments from American and European perspectives as well as the East/ West view. I’ve also featured the longer comment by Matthew G on how being bi-lingual in English and Japanese brings out different aspects of his personality.

I had all these thoughts present in my mind this week when we went out to eat in London and found ourselves yet again having an extortionately expensive and depressingly untasty meal. It’s tiring to have one’s tastebuds dismayed and one’s wallet emptied so many times in London. It’s not just English food I’m feeling grumpy about - it’s cuisine from anywhere in the world served up in England, and specifically London. Perhaps in London and the high rents and a sense that the city is so huge that you don’t really have to offer great food, there’ll be enough people coming along to keep your restaurant afloat. Or perhaps it’s a state of mind.

When talking about food in Chinese, we have the word “heong”, which has no direct translation into English. In my mind, it means a combination of tasty, delicious, aromatic and lip-smacking. The taste occurs in the nose and palate as well as just the tongue. It involves more than just a taste like salty or sour or sweet - there are flavours and aromas and scents that happen as you chew and savour your mouthful. Sometimes, it’s about fried garlic or caramelized soy sauce or coriander or any other spice and other times it’s just about the aroma and flavour of whatever is the essence of the dish emerging.

I think it’s significant that there is no direct equivalent word or direct translation of this concept in English. If you don’t get the concept, how can you get the thing itself?

So if no-one around you cares about food being “heong”, why bother to try and create that experience for them just as a matter of course?

It is of course not true to say that all restaurants in England are awful and I am not saying that at all. I just think that there are a great many that are outrageously priced for the kind of tasteless dishes they offer up and it takes a lot of effort to find a good reasonably priced restaurant in England. In Malaysia, you can go to any road side stall run by someone from the back of their motorbike and have a really yummy laksa or fried noodles or satay for the equivalent of 50p. People expect their food to be “heong”, even at that end of the spectrum. Sigh. I feel very homesick for some “heong” food right now!

At last, we have hard evidence of the reason behind the UK pensions crisis (the crisis that is about to hit my generation as more and more people are getting older and there are fewer and fewer young folk to pay into the pensions fund). A BUPA-commissioned survey this week revealed that Britons would give up sex if that meant they could live longer - see the report on BBC News here.

But then we always knew that Brits were not that keen on getting all hot and sweaty anyway (unless it’s to do the gardening). George Mikes in his book “How to be a Brit” has a chapter entitled “The British and Sex” and it contains only one line: The British don’t have sex, they have hot water bottles.

The Cornish Pasty is the iconic food of Cornwall. Everywhere we went during our holiday there a few weeks back, the delicious smell of pasties wafted out at us from bakeries and whole shops devoted to the speciality. They are savoury portable meat pies in a distinctive half moon shape. To my Eastern eye, they look like giant curry puffs.

The outer case of the pasty is made of golden brown pastry that crackles and flakes as you bite into it. Its shape comes from folding a large circle of pastry over the filling and braiding the resulting curved edge. The traditional filling is steak and potatoes but these days, there’s lamb and mint and steak & stilton and a whole range more. They have a satisfying, heavy feel in your hand, about the size and weighty book.

Curry puffs are much smaller. They can be the same handbag shape as a pasty or sometimes can look like a fatter and shorter sausage roll. Inside, the filling is made of minced pork, chicken or beef, onions, vegetables and potatoes fried in dry spicy curry. You can get fried puffs with crispy oily pastry or baked ones with flaky puff pastry. Even describing it now makes me drool…. Bizarrely, the best curry puff I’ve had was at the canteen in Singapore General Hospital some years back.

Pasties are really yum on a blustery Cornish day. We shared one in Falmouth as Hurricane Gordon blew itself in across the Atlantic, the sky glowering darkly and the sea sharp and choppy in the bay. The light drizzle was like a sheet of pins thrown at us by the wind. A hot pasty in our hands, steaming in the cold, was just what we needed.

But there is always a slight disappointment in the back of my mind. Tasty as pasties are, they strongly retain their ancient British identity as solid, rather bland but nourishing food. They aren’t - and never will be nor should be - spicy, meaty curry puffs wafting of garlic and coriander and burning your mouth with the more pugnacious taste of the East. Sigh. I do miss a good curry puff eaten in the sweltering heat of a street market…

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Can you tell which is the pic of Cornish Pasties and which of Curry Puffs?

Picture A

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Picture B

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Answer: A = Curry Puffs; B = Cornish Pasties

During our holiday in Cornwall, we visited Newquay, once a fishing village and now a prime destination for surfers from all over the world. The town sprawls down the clifftop nestled within several magnificent bays where the surf rides dramatically into shore. High cliffs circle the bays like fortress walls.

Just outside the main town, perched on the very edge of a soaring clifftop, is the historic Huers Hut. Made of stone, it looks like a white-washed domed temple that might just as easily have been in Greece. Its curved walls face the land while an open patio looks out to sea, a giant fireplace and chimney taking up most of space inside.

In the fourteenth century, this was where the huer would stand watch, gazing out to the vast ocean waiting for the pilchards. When he saw the shoals of fish, he would raise the hue and cry to alert the fishermen in the village and they would rush out to launch their boats and head to catch their precious livelihood. Standing on the cliff top, the huer would direct the boats towards the pilchards like a general mustering his army, using hand signals and calls.

The pilchards have declined and commercial fishing is not enough to sustain the people of Newquay. But “raising the hue and cry” remains.

Continuing my report from our holiday in Cornwall….

We arrived at our holiday cottage in a valley not far from the north Cornish coast late in the afternoon. We tumbled in, tired and grumpy. We had had a long drive from London and there was still the unpacking to do. But the charm of the place perked us up. It was one of those cute, tiny little cottages with timbered beams across a low ceiling and vast open fireplaces dating from over 200 years ago. There was an richly textured garden of flowers and shrubs in the front and a lawn at the back. And - perking us up even more - there was a basket of fresh scones, a bowl of strawberry jam and a pot of clotted cream waiting for us in the kitchen.

The unpacking could wait. At at time like this, there was nothing for it but to put the kettle on, lay out the cream tea spread out in the garden and settle down for a yummy time.

Clotted cream is made from the thick cream floating at the top of full fat milk. You skim it off and boil it down till its even thicker and richer. Then you let it cool and refrigerate for a few days. The result is a gooey, vanilla-ish, glop that you can dollop on any dessert or fruit.

Scones are a cross between bread and cake - the best ones are light and fluffy with big fat currants in them. The genius of cream teas is that somehow, the blend of crumbly scone with strawberry jam and a dollop of clotted cream interspersed with lashings of hot tea just meld together into a taste experience of sheer bliss.

Whoever said that English food is not much to write home about?

Throughout our week in Cornwall, wherever we turned, there was clotted cream. You could have it on apple and blackberry crumble or with fresh strawberries or on fruit tarts or more scones than you could dream of. We took to having cream tea for breakfast as well as tea time. We walked on cliffs all over the coast but clearly did not walk long enough or hard enough to burn off the joys of clotted cream. Looking at our snapshots of our holiday, you can see me getting chubbier and rounder as the week goes on… Oh dear.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Daphne du Maurier and I’ve read as many of her her books and short stories as I could get hold of. Most, if not all, of her novels were set in Cornwall and described a dramatic and beautiful coastal landscape punctuated by empty moorland. The most evocative works, I think, were “Frenchman’s Creek”, “Jamaica Inn” and of course, “Rebecca”.

Curiously, I had never managed to take a trip to Cornwall until last week when we headed down for a week’s holiday in a country cottage. I had had a hectic time at work and I was tired. It was a long drive from London and as we got stuck in yet another traffic jam, I was beginning to wonder if it was really going to be worth the effort. But then, we pulled out of Exeter and haded up into the heart of Bodmin Moor and it was as if we had dropped out of the hurly burly of reality into the landscape of great fiction.

Bodmin Moor was just how I had imagined it to be - vast swathes of heath and moor, sweeping out across the vista like a stormy sea carved into the dark earth while in the distance, craggy tors brooded sullenly. You see - the drama of the view even makes one wax into purple prose. I was thrilled to see that you can go to the Daphne du Maurier Experience at Jamaica Inn - yes, there really is a Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor - where you can see her writing desk and recreations of scenes from “Frenchman’s Creek”. (We didn’t stop this time - but next time, I shall be there with my camera for a must-have pic of The Desk…)

We went for walks along the cliff tops and again, it was like being in one of her novels - this time, “Rebecca”. The South West Coastal Path perches you on the cliff edge, one precarious footstep away from certain death on sharp, rugged rocks in a foaming sea. I kept thinking of Mrs Danvers saying to the nameless heroine, “Go on, jump. You know you want to.”

Happily, the thought of cream teas and saffron buns kept me from the hypnotic pull of the rhythmic waves… you know you want to, you know you want to. No. No, I don’t want to. I want hot buttered scones and clotted cream.

I shall now have to dig out my old Daphne du Maurier novels and re-read them all. With the nights drawing in and the winter chill in the air, the next few months will be a great time to snuggle up in bed with hot chocolate and a windswept book.

If you’re a Daphne du Maurier fan, do share your thoughts about Cornwall, her books, your favourite characters/ scenes, cream teas… please add a comment or email me.

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It was misty and cool when I woke up the other morning. Summer has turned now and we are in the first steps of creeping towards autumn.

As a kid in Malaysia, I used to read books set in England, describing mist and fog and it was really hard to imagine what that would be like. Until we went on a family holiday to Fraser’s Hill (as it was then called). Up in the blue-green hills, surrounded by thick jungle, the air was cool and fresh - as if the place were air-conditioned against the thick, heavy tropical heat of the lowlands. In the chalets where we stayed, the lawn had different, more delicate grass. There were bright rose bushes and exotic plants from cooler climes. In the mornings, the mist would sit damply over the hill. Everything seemed mysterious and spooky. I loved it.

The school I came to in England is on the south coast, facing the English Channel. On some winter days, the fog rolling in from the sea would white out the landscape for days on end. At intervals, the fog horn would sound, mournful and eery in the muffled stillness. The air would taste damp and salty and if you spent any time out in the fog, you would come in covered in dew.

My parents were in London in the late 1950s at the time when there were thick “peasoupers” - a combination of fog and pollution from coal fires. Traffic would grind to a halt and people would have to walk. But even walking was hazardous as they would not be able to identify any landmarks or see more than a foot in front of them. My parents describe how the fog would get inside their flats as well, no matter how much they tried to seal the windows and doors with rags. My mum said that even their undergarments would be stained yellow from the noxious “soup”!

I’m glad those days are gone! But I love autumn when the leaves start to turn golden and the air cools - just before it gets really miserably into winter. And on misty mornings, I always think of Keats’s Ode to Autumn:

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease, 10
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.