Christmas cake

“Would you make us a traditional English Christmas cake?” asked my very dear friend, with whose family I will spend Christmas Eve.

“Yes, of course,” I said, even though the request came in early December and if a Christmas fruitcake is to be good, if should be made no later than September.

When I first came to live in the United States, I couldn’t understand why fruitcake was such a joke. It was something I loved. Then I tasted the local version, and (all apologies to my adopted country), I understood why. The American version is extremely sweet, glutinous, overloaded with glace cherries, angelica, citron, and so on; and the bought version has a chemical taste.

An English fruitcake contains raisins, currants, sultanas (unobtainable in my region of the U.S., and no, golden raisins are not the same thing), a small amount of candied cherries and lemon and orange peel; and rum and brandy. By the time it’s aged, with the help of regular drinks of rum and brandy poured over it, it’s rich but not over-sweet. A week before Christmas, it’s coated with a layer of marzipan, and a few days later, it is frosted with Royal icing (powdered sugar, egg white, and lemon juice) and decorated with tiny figurines of snowmen, Father Christmas, and so on. It is placed on a cake board, something you can buy easily in England at this time of year but not in the United States; then it’s surrounded by a paper cake frill, something else unobtainable here, so I made a reusable fabric one many years ago.

When I was little, I’d carefully separate the marzipan from the cake and the white icing, give the marzipan to my father, and eat the cake and white icing. Since I’ve (sort of) grown up, I scrape off the white icing and eat the cake and the marzipan.

My cake hasn’t had enough time to grow into its role. It’ll be okay but not stellar. And it’s been many years since I made and iced a Christmas cake; the icing, which I did last night, is way too sweet. I should have put in fewer egg whites and more lemon juice. However, it looks pretty and brings back childhood memories, and since mine were happy, scraping off the frosting won’t make a difference.

Please to remember

Please to remember
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

In 1605, a group of English Roman Catholic conspirators were discovered to have stored some 1,800 pounds of gunpowder in a cellar under the House of Lords in the British Houses of Parliament. The idea was to wipe out King James I of England (VI of Scotland), his family, and most of the aristocracy (the Lords) by putting a match to the whole thing during the State Opening of Parliament.

One of the conspirators, however, was concerned that some of those who would be blown up were Catholics and wrote a letter of warning to Lord Monteagle. On November 5, 1605, the cellars were raided, and Guy Fawkes was discovered and arrested. Under torture, he revealed the names of his co-conspirators, who were rounded up or killed trying to evade capture. In January 1606, Fawkes and a number of the others were tried and found guilty of treason. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Guy Fawkes and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 are remembered every November 5 in England with fireworks and bonfires on which effigies of Guy Fawkes are burned (gruesome entertainment for children, when you think about it). One of the best parts was tucking potatoes at the base of the bonfire to bake in the embers. By the time the fireworks were over, the potatoes were cooked. The skins were charred and you always burned your fingers, but no baked potatoes have ever tasted as good as those.

In the days leading up to the 5th children used, when I was growing up, to haul the effigies around on makeshift carts or pushchairs (strollers), chanting, “Penny for the guy,” and collecting money for fireworks. I don’t know if they still do.

Fresh fruit and veg

Something I love in London (and miss in Washington, D.C.) is buying my fruits and vegetables from a greengrocer whose stall is on the sidewalk like this one in Turnham Green in west London. This man ambled into my shot and appears to be pondering the contents of the stall. I hope he’s thinking that replacing fish and chips and bangers and mash with some of the huge variety of fresh produce available here would help his waistline.

Eyeing London

The London Eye is on my list of things to do sometime when I visit my hometown. The day I took this picture would have been perfect for a clear view from 135 metres, but of course everyone else had the same idea. It’s efficiently managed—rather like a ski lift, it’s a perpetual process of replacing the group returning with the group departing—but it still would have taken up more time than I wanted to give up on this occasion. There’s an official site if you’re interested in booking advance tickets online (and saving 10 percent), but for interesting information, Wikipedia is a better bet.

Old and new

Blackfriars Bridge is a railway bridge over the River Thames in London. The first structure was opened in 1864, but as time passed, it was not strong enough to support modern trains, so a replacement was built. However, the support columns of the old bridge remain, which makes for the kind of surrealistic view that I might have dreamed.

Royal Holloway College

The University of London is a collegiate university, and this is Royal Holloway, one of the colleges (no relation to Holloway, the famous women’s prison). The college was founded in 1979 by Thomas Holloway, who made his fortune—several million pounds sterling of it—in patent medicines. He was looking for a philanthropic enterprise, and the college, which was originally for women only, was the suggestion of his wife Jane. Royal Hollway merged with the University of London’s Bedford College (also originally a women’s institution) in 1985, 20 years after both colleges began to admit men.

The architecture was inspired by the sixteenth century Chateau of Chambord in the Loire Valley, and the effect of Renaissance blended with Victoriana is completely over-the-top, but to my surprise, I found myself liking it for its sheer abandon and audacity.

The Gherkin

This building, in London’s financial district and towering over the nearby Tower of London (which you can’t see in this picture), is known as “The Gherkin”—gherkin is a pickled cucumber—and less widely as the Crystal Phallus, a play on the famous Crystal Palace, site of the Great Exhibition of 1851. To me it looks more like a rocket waiting to launch.

The Gherkin, home to the Swiss Re reinsurance company, is the second tallest building in the City of London (an area of a square mile) and the sixth tallest building in the whole of London. The architects were Sir Norman Foster and former business partner Ken Shuttleworth.

According to Wikipedia, in December 2005, The Gherkin was voted the most admired new building in the world based on a survey of the world’s largest firms of architects, as published in 2006 BD World Architecture 200. On the other hand, in June 2006, it was nominated as one of the five ugliest buildings in London.

Tastes differ. I like it.

The Royal Mail

If you want to mail a letter in Great Britain, look for a pillar box. Whether in the form of the pillars for which they are named or set into walls (yet still called pillar boxes), they are always red. People have been dropping letters into them since they were introduced in the 1850s.

Pillar box designs change. The more modern ones are round or, if they have two slots (one for in town and the other for out of town), oval. This design dates from 1866-1879 and is the Penfold Hexagonal. You’ll find it on a residential street in Chiswick in West London.

Alison

Most people, when they think of sculpture in Trafalgar Square, think of Lord Nelson on his column. But there are other statues, and now that feeding the pigeons is illegal so the square isn’t knee-deep in birds, feathers, poop, people selling birdseed at outrageous prices, and tourists covered with pigeons, you can actually see them. At the four corners are statues of King George IV, Gen. Charles Napier, Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Havelock (yeah, I hadn’t heard of the two military gents either), and until fairly recently, an empty plinth. Back in the 1840s, the fourth plinth was paid for, but there wasn’t enough money for the statue.

In the late 1990s, the empty fourth plinth became home to a rotating series of temporary sculptures, which gave rise to the Fourth Plinth Project. The latest statue is Alison Lapper Pregnant, a 3.5 meter, 13 tonne sculpture of a British artist born with no arms and malformed legs, pregnant with her son. Lapper specializes in art portraying disabilities. The sculpture in Trafalgar Square is the work of Marc Quinn.

I wish I liked it. We spend too much time glorifying the latest ephemeral perception of physical perfection, so saying that a disabled person is equally worthy of celebration is something I applaud. But I don’t like this sculpture. It certainly personifies something I believe in intellectually, but when faced with the reality, my emotional response is boredom.

On first sight, I didn’t take in anything except a huge, glaring white sculpture of a nude female that didn’t fit with the rest of Victorian Trafalgar Square. I didn’t notice, until my friend pointed it out, that the statue had no arms (maybe I’m conditioned by the Venus de Milo). I think this is a very dull piece of sculpture, competent but (to me) uninspired. If the model had arms and perfect limbs and had not been pregnant, thereby meeting all sorts of levels of political correctness, would the statue have merited a place, however temporary, in Trafalgar Square?

And—I need to be totally honest— how much does my discomfort with the subject also weigh into this? I know it does.

But nobody asked my opinion, and Alison will be in situ only until the end of March 2007. In April, she’ll be replaced by Thomas Schütte’s Hotel for the Birds. Apparently no one mentioned to Herr Schütte that the pigeons are no longer welcome in Trafalgar Square.

If only

In the Washington, DC area, where I now live, it is required that dog owners pick up after their pets, and most people do. When I go back to England (and other European countries), it is a different situation. Despite the exhortations stencilled on the sidewalks, you still need to keep your eyes down so that you don’t step in something a dog and its owner have left behind.

Allotments

In the U.K., allotments—community gardens—are trendy.

An allotment is a piece of land owned by local government and rented out at a nominal annual sum to local residents so they can grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The allotment system began in the 18th century, and over the years, allotments have waxed and waned in popularity. During World War II, the “Dig for Victory”campaign encouraged interest in allotments and provided an important supplementary source of food for Britons living with food rationing. (For example, 4 oz butter, 2 oz cheese, and 1 egg per person per week, and similar rationing of meat, milk, and other staples—interesting to note, for those of us who eat far more, rationing improved the nation’s health.) People continued to cultivate allotments for a while after the war, but by the sixties and seventies, many allotments had been abandoned and were overgrown.

Gradually, in the nineties, interest awakened, and now many people—including D., the friend I stayed with in London—have taken up allotment gardening. I helped D. pick, and later enjoyed, redcurrants, raspberries, spinach, snow peas/mange-tout, and courgettes. There’s much more to come, but alas, I won’t be there to enjoy it.

I asked the purpose of the jars and things atop the stakes, expecting something very scientific. The answer, however, was pragmatic: “So that you don’t lurch into them and poke your eye out,” said D.

When the bough breaks, the cradle WON’T fall

Who spared Cock Robin?
“I,” said the sparrow,
“With my bow and arrow,
I spared Cock Robin.”

A couple of months ago, a colleague at work passed on to me the news that a few elementary schools in Oxfordshire are cleaning up nursery rhymes and fairy tales. “Your countrymen—oops, countrypersons—are at it again,” he said. Baa Baa Black Sheep is apparently now Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep, and the seven dwarves have been sanitized from the title of Snow White. Whether from the story itself wasn’t made clear.

According to the manager (which must be the new, improved name for headmaster) of two area schools, “No one should feel pointed out because of their race, gender, or anything else.”

Nor should children be exposed to unhappy endings, we gather: in the revised version, all the king’s men do put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Note to Oxfordshire schools: in the interests of equality, please ensure that the King admits women to the Grand Old Duke of York’s 10,000 persons.

In this brave new kinderworld, I suppose there’ll be no more baking blackbirds in pies, and Tom Tom the Piper’s son’s pig will become a beloved family pet instead of Sunday lunch. Red Riding Hood’s wolf will serve a prison sentence for assault and attempted corruption of a minor, during which time he’ll become a born-again Christian and upon release, spend the rest of his life helping the poor. It does my heart good.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the idea of making everyone feel accepted. Finally Polly and Sukey can come out of the closet, stop arguing about the kettle, and set up a nice little cottage industry knitting mufflers out of Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’s wool.