Nostalgia: thy name is me

Yes, I own up. Nostalgia is my constant companion. It has to be. I feel a misfit at this time with all its war and violence and greed and individualism and corruption. Where has all the idealism gone? So when Ms Robyn got nostalgic too about The Desiderata there was an "oh yes" in my heart and spirit and I had to blog it too.

A book a day keeps ignorance away

Along Miss Eagle's circuitous career, Miss Eagle has been a librarian.

This has had the effect of making her rather picky about libraries.

Miss Eagle doesn't think much of her local library.

She has transferred her allegiance and her membership to

the City Library in Flinders Lane.

There is a very civilized coffee shop with a hole in the wall if you want to grab and run.

There is a wonderful Mirka Mora mural.

Mirka Mora is one of Melbourne's best loved artists.

The Reverend is a brick

Over at Alas Maia has linked us to The Brick Testament. It is a joy and delight. Watch it! There are classifications for sexual content, violence, nudity, and cursing. Enjoy.

Central Park craftiness

A delightful Melbourne favourite - Patchwork on Central Park

I am willing

I discovered this poem over at the Sacred Ordinary. Fran had found it by googling the phrase I am willing. This is not only my own mantra - it describes much about me. I have found an illustration here. It is the work of Connie Bowen.

I Am Willing
copyrighted by Margaret Dubay Mikus

I am willingto change what doesn’t workfor me in my life.

I am willing to listenwith an open heart,without judging.

I am willing to plant seedsthat take a long time,if ever, to grow.

I am willing to feel and let go.

I am willing to make mistakes and learn from them.

I am willing to live in the present.

I am willing to forgive and forget in my heart.

I am willing to love as much as my endless spirit will allow.

I am willing to be seen in all my radiance.

I am willing to be fearless.

I am willing to be powerful
.
I am willing to be peaceful.

I am willing to stand tall and walk gracefully.

I am willing to sing with my stunning, full voice.

I am willing to allow.

I am willing to let go.

I am willing to change.

I am willing to seeand be seen.

I am willing to hearand be heard.

I am willing to feel and be felt.

I am willing to heal and be healed.

I am willing to love and be loved.

I am willing to be fully human.

Skinny and white

Maybe I'm the last person to know about this, but I was gobsmacked when Herself brought home to-day White Glo toothpaste. The front part of the package, the one you see on the supermarket shelf, makes no claim about what this toothpaste does to and for your teeth - but it has two names because it is also referred to as Crave Away appetite control toothpaste. It claims to help "suppress appetite and reduce food cravings" through a homeopathic formula. Apparently, the formula works because it

is absorbed into the bloodstream through the lining of the mouth as you brush your teeth. The unique ingredients send a signal to your brain indicating "fullness" and assisting in suppressing appetite and good craving! After brushing, you don't feel the urge to eat as much!

If this really, truly works we will have to change our habits.

Don't brush after meals, brush before.

Meanwhile, over in Hardware Lane...

... the only hardware getting a guernsey these days is the knife and fork.

Centre Place and Shag

I love the lanes and arcades of Melbourne.

They give it that special European quality.

Centre Place is one of my favourites.

At one end of Centre Place is Shag.

Beloved of all retro and vintage gals.

I always stop by - but there is nothing to fit me.

However, I'm trying to do something about that so I live in hope.

I didn't realise that when I did this photo, it would also be a self-portrait...

There are hats...

and shoes...

and accessories...

and then there's the decor...

LONG LIVE SHAG!

Ancient Wisdom - seasons of the soul 2

Thinking more upon the seasons, my thoughts turned to that beautiful song from The Seekers, Turn, Turn, Turn. It is based on a passage from the Tanakh to be found in Chapter 3 of a book of great and ancient wisdom called Ecclesiastes:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;

a time of war, and a time of peace.

The measure of success

“I believe that anyone can be successful in life,

regardless of natural talent

or the environment within which we live.

This is not based on measuring success by human competitiveness

for wealth, possessions, influence, and fame,

but adhering to God’s standards

of truth, justice, humility, service,

compassion, forgiveness, and love.”

~ Jimmy Carter,in his book Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis

The Summons - an eternal call to a lived life

The song below comes from the Iona Community, centred on the island of Iona in Scotland. The song is sung to a traditional Scottish tune called, "Kelvin Grove". You can hear it here. One of the writers of the words is John Bell (pictured at right). Occasionally he pops up in Australia and he is worth listening to. He has a lyrical Gaelic voice: sings like a bird. The words are written as if spoken by Jesus to the individual. They would form a beautiful reflection for Lent.

THE SUMMONS
Sung to the traditional Scottish melody Kelvin Grove
From the Iona Community

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?
Will you come where you don't know and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known,
Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?

Will you the blinded see, if I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoners free and never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean, and do such as this unseen,
And admit to what I mean in you and you in me?

Will you love the ‘you’ you hide if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same?
Will you use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around
Through my sight and touch and sound in you, and you in me?

Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.
In your company I'll go where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I'll move and live and grow in you and you in me.

Text: John L. Bell and Graham Maule

Seasons of the Soul

The Trad Pad has long espoused being attuned to the seasons. We pay too much attention to beginning seasons on 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, 1 December. These are nothing more than program defaults. If we pay attention our own local environments, we will discerns more specific times, more localised patterns. Whitefellas commonly speak of two seasons in Northern Australia - The Wet and The Dry. However, Aborigines in Kakadu speak of six seasons, including one name "The Knock 'em Down Storms". In Northern Australia, November has always been known as the time when people go "troppo". Going troppo now has the more civilized name of "Mango Madness" - being the time when, traditionallyl, mangos would be ready to pick. Going troppo meant going nuts, going mad. Suicides would occur, men would shoot their wives. November is hot and dry and in some areas there is a frequency of dry weather whirlwinds known as willy willies. The Wet has not yet arrived but heat and the dryness have everyone strung out, hanging out for rain. In Darwin and the Top End of the Northern Territory, people refer to the "build up". This always amused me because while Cairns and Townsville in North Queensland would suffer during this time from this torrid mix of heat and humidity, there was no particular name for it as in the NT. I have wondered if this means that Top Enders complain more about this and therefore have a need for a word or phrase and if North Queenslanders are more inclined to get on with things and suffer through this time so that - apart from Mango Madness - there are no other words required.

I also believe in keeping The Seasons of the Soul - the spiritual times, the faith filled times. I am a Christian in the Western tradition so the seasons I keep are in accord with this culture and this tradition. Since Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, Christians in the Western tradition have been in the period of Lent. Lent is a reflect period of pray and penitence, denial and discipline. It is serious stuff as we look at our lives, how we are living, where we are going. It is serious stuff about our relationship with out God and our relationship with other people and our relationship with the planet we have been given. So I am keeping the season by God's grace. I just pray that I can be honest with myself and am able to carry out the necessary personal corrections and reforms.

Simply amazing...

...that's how I felt watching Mr Chang making chinese wheat noodles on Martha this morning. Did you see it? I have found a picture which can give a glimpse into the process. Mr Chang took a lump of dough and tossed it and flipped it between his hands until it became a stretched tube of dough and then went on to twist it and twirl it and put it on a board and twist it some more until he could pick it up and, without a knife or an Italian pasta machine, the dough fell into lengths of noodle. A miracle before my eyes! Gobsmacking delight.

Give it to me slow and hot....

Clockwide from left: Aga; La Cornue; Bonnet; a Camp Oven

If there is a Trad Pad icon, it's an Aga stove. Not that I'm picky you know. I just love slow combustion stoves. I did have a great set up once - I had a bush kitchen. I lived in Mount Isa in north-west Queensland in the late 70s to the mid 80s. This was not the place to have slow combustion stoves indoors. Mount Isa's summer heat did not need any additional assistance. But my favourite stoves found me. There were three stoves. Indoors, in the kitchen renovations, went the electric stove I had drooled over when I was a new bride in the early 60s. It was dated but good as new and we got it cheaply. It was an eye level oven with pull-out coiled hot plates and behind them a heated glass area for keeping things warm. But who (and I expect it was a male) decided to put grills in eye level ovens? Some masochist who likes fat spitting in his eye? Then came the wood stove for free and, for $30 at an opp shop, an Everhot slow combustion stove which only needed a new firebrick. My Resourceful Husband - who built a stone wall and did the backyard stone paving - organised me an outdoor kitchen. The wood stove, with cast aluminium plates sitting on top, did duty as a barbecue. Next to the wood stove sat this five foot long stainless steel trolley purchased at an auction at the Barkly Hotel. Just the thing for putting all the cooking stuff on. Next to that sat the Everhot. Resourceful Husband built a huge table on either side of which went two upholstered forms (like school forms) which also came from the Barkly Hotel. The outdoor kitchen was where all the proper cooking got done. The Everhot, as slow combustion stoves do, did justice to slow cooking roasts and casseroles and, requiring a hotter oven, bread baking.

The love for Agas came from childhood. At Merinda, there was a huge range. My father used to cook steaks straight on the hotplates. At Queen's Beach, the Aga was smaller. I remember my father once doing a wonderful Magpie Goose casserole after a hunting trip. They weren't protected then. But I am realist. I saw my mother have too many difficulties when things went wrong with the stoves - and the least said about that the better.

Now Agas have achieved great status. But I have discovered there are two stoves even higher up the status rankings - both French. They are the La Cornue and the Bonnet - that come with six figure price tags. The Bonnet is custom made - I think you probably order by the foot - and is in the realm of high end chefs and restaurants. How did I learn all this? From this article. It is rather longish but a good read on kitchen technology, how useful it really is, and the current status of kitchens.

It says:

If Aga has a rival, it is the La Cornue stove—“the Rolls Royce of stoves,” as one owner described it to the New York Times. “Vikings are good, but this one has all the beauty you would associate with a nineteenth-century kitchen in Provence, and it’s state of the art. It took us ten years to get it, and it has our names on it,” engraved on a brass plaque. Even more rarified is the Bonnet, a stove the New York Times described as “custom-made by hand in France in solid cast iron with an installer
flown over to assemble it on site.” It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But all this wonderful stuff doesn't turn people into great cooks. It doesn't make them even mediocre cooks. You are either a cook or you aren't - and a good a cook can cook anywhere on anything - an open fire or a camp oven. The following para horrified me. This is even worse than Kathy Lette getting rid of her dining table.

Eating together is now so unusual that the Nickelodeon television network teamed up with the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) and declared the fourth Monday in September to be “Family Day—A Day to Eat Dinner With Your Children.” Families pledge to eat
together and turn off their television sets in the hope of sparking spontaneous dinner conversation (the irony of a television network urging families to turn off their TVs and have dinner together was evidently lost on organizers of the event).

I mentioned this development to Herself. She wondered why it was necessary. Didn't U.S. families get together and eat at Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving? But if you don't understand good food, don't eat good food, and don't bother to cook good food, why would you bother to take time to sit around a table and make the whole food thing a social event?

Melbourne's 19th century style

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One of Melbourne's favourite pieces of architecture is the Block Arcade.

It is beautiful, graceful and just a pleasure to be in.

There is a little lane that leads out to Little Collin Street.

This is what it looks like.

The Blogging Blahs or How to Get a Real Life

Justin Hall, the first blogger

Computers have always tempted some members of the human race to hang around them ad infinitum ad nauseam. We call them geeks. Then a while ago along came blogs, blogging, and people like us who are called bloggers. Jane over at yarnstorm is taking a week off to read her eyes out of her head. Susan at Pea Soup is making apologies for her absence. I find that I have had to take time out not only for the pesky computer repairs but to get on with real life. But why apologise. The blogosphere is not real life - it is a description of life, it is a form of communication with similar people at the other end of the ether but it is not real life. Real life has family, kids, craft, books, art, travel, food, recipes, houses, decor, gardens, sewing, clothes, decorating - all things we can see and feel and touch and taste. And now I discover that Justin Hall, the very first blogger of them all, has given up blogging and is busy getting on with his own real life. His real life is comprised of writing articles about digital culture, making short videos, editing that wonderful gift, Wikipedia, and he's a graduate student in the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.

Brocante Home is passing on the idea of a "no computer" day: having a blog free day - and tips on how you might do it.

If you want to catch up with some very good articles on the world of blogging and put it all in perspective, I refer you to posts over at The Eagle's Nest here and here.

We are saddened...

Stevie-Lee Weight, aged 15 (centre), Cassandra Manners, aged16 (right), Josephine Calvi aged 16 (left)

Read the beautiful article about Stevie-Lee here.

...because on Saturday night six young people in Mildura were killed. They were walking at the side of a country road, a car came around the corner, skidded in the gravel edges of the bitumen road. Five were killed instantly, the sixth died later in a hospital in Adelaide and two are in hospital seriously ill. Our Victorian government agonizes over its road toll. Victoria is a small but populous state but, even to me who comes from northern Australia, the toll seems horrendous. Although Queensland is so worried that it is at the moment in the middle of a summit with its community to try to find new ways to address the issue.

When young lives are taken, it is haunting for those left behind - particularly when young people are taken en masse instantly. Grief descends like a pall on the affected community. The grief of family and close friends - words are unable to describe. I think of their friends left behind. Grief is difficult for us all to articulate. How then do the young understand, work out, articulate their emotions? The funerals are yet to occur. I don't know these people or this community - but my love and concern and empathy go out to them. My heart aches for them.

My heart also aches for another family. An aboriginal family. A man who now carries a burden beyond comprehension and sits in a jail cell far away from his family and his community. I feel for his mother and his partner who don't understand how one they love is in this predicament. Above all, I am filled with love, compassion, and concern for two little children who are victims too. They were in the car with their father - a father who, perhaps, they may never know, at least in the way we understand fathers should be in relation to their children. What stories will they know about what happened last Saturday night? Will their father's burden become their burden as they grow to maturity?

Life is the ultimate creativity. The lives of all these children were fully of energy and promise - until Saturday night when the opposite of creativity - destruction - came upon them. Those who died will be remembered as ever young, ever beautiful. What happens with those who survive? Destruction leaves its scars - always. May our compassion for all of them be ongoing so that life can be creative and joyful for them once again.

Saucer Cakes

Thanks to yarnstorm

my investigation into Saucer Cheese Cake

has been taken a step further

to Mrs Beeton's recipe for Saucer Cake.

Winifred Holtby, South Riding & Saucer Cheese Cake

Currently, I am reading South Riding by Winifred Holtby.

In the novel, she refers in passing to a saucer cheese cake.

Can anyone tell me what this is?

Is there a recipe?

Life and growth

Calidore is thinking of life and its changes and passages. The best books I have read on this topic are Passages and New Passages by Gail Sheehy. Sheehy is a psychologist but does not speak psychobabble. She wrote Passages quite a while ago - back in the lat 70s or early 80s. Then a few years back she did a revised version called New Passages because she believed things had progressed so much that various changes were being extended or occurring later - on average by a decade. This is because people are living longer and healthier, they are better educated, etc.

A metaphor she uses and which I use frequently because it is so applicable is the story of the lobster. To grow the lobster must shed its hard carapace. If the lobster did not do this, the growing lobster would be choked to death by the hard, too small shell. So the shell is shed. However, while the lobster is waiting for the new protective carapace to form and grow, it is quite vulnerable and its soft flesh is exposed. We are like this too. In our growth periods, we shed what has been protective for us. As we move into the new stage or stages of our lives we are vulnerable. We are not there yet. Our new form of protection has not arrived, is not functional.

I find this so helpful. It helps to discern what is going on in me and my life: the restlessness, the crankiness with what is around me, the mistakes I make as I move in a new way. These, I now recognise, are my own personal growing pains. Old things are falling away as I grow into new areas. But I am human. I am fallible and I am vulnerable.