More dinner bliss

And we did!

Sophie and Phil are brilliant musicians and fabulous friends and we don't see them nearly often enough.

So when we had a text to say 'how's Tuesday for dinner', we fell over ourselves to make it happen. After all, we'd been promising since we moved into this place that we'd have them to dinner, and we move out in less than 3 weeks!

Sophie is a member of the brilliant Magpie Lane*, who I finally managed to see live just before Christmas. And she and Phil are among that rare breed of 'people who play together a lot' who just know one another's timing and harmonies as naturally as breathing.

On a good night, Anthony and I can find something of it too, but whenever we hear it, it's breathtaking, uplifting and balm for the soul. Phil and Soph are also proper foodies, and Phil loves a good red - he brought one with him, and it matched a treat with the roast lamb, christmas pudding and cointreau butter that constituted our version of my friend Zenta's 'Christmas the sequel'.

After dinner, Sophie got all excited (in that fabulous, 'kid in a lolly shop' way that she does so well) about my christmas pressies from Ants.... She already has a dress - so we might make a re-enactor out of her yet. I'm quite enjoying this dinner-do thing... i cant wait til we can do it in our new house too!

*The group takes its name from an infamous Oxford street, known as a reliable place to find ladies of negotiable charms, and in pre-Victorian times called for centuries by the less salubrious Gropec*nt Lane. Truly!

Bliss for dinner

It began with a boast about gravlax. 'What's that then?' asked Em, on a rare quiet moment on the desk at work.

'It's where you take salmon and you cure it in your fridge on a bed of rock salt (maybe with a bit of vodka, lemon and dill) and you serve it up with rye bread and cream cheese and more dill and lemon and radishes and it's delicious. We used to gravlax a whole salmon every Christmas.'

(English people still find it soooo amazing that, when it's 35 degrees outside, Aussies eschew slaving over a hot roast turkey, in favour of seafood, maybe a bbq, cold ham, potato salad, other salads, christmas pud with ice cream, lashings of cold ones, and a swim. Does life get better?)

'Ooooh! Sounds amazing. Tomaz loves seafood - can we make some when he visits from Slovenia?'

And so a very cunning plan was born... The challenge was to put together a three course meal that had a seafood theme to all three courses. The gravlax entree (in the UK they call it a 'starter') was the easy part.

From there we moved on to a seafood risotto ('king' prawns were recently on sale at Sainsbury's - the mostly-english dinner guests all oooh-ed and aaaah-ed about the size of them, but they were soo little compared to even the ordinary prawns we get at home!) and that amazing Marsanne. Then came my cunning piece de resistance: Guylian chocolate seashells floating on a 'sea' of mousse. The original plan was a chocolate mousse, but a week ago I realised that everything except the mousse was on the 'safe' list of a friend who is on a really insane allergy-testing regime (fish, rice, certain veg, lemons, dairy stuff as long as it's 'on the side). And apples. So I found, and followed, a recipe for a baked 'apple mousse' and it worked a treat! I was soooo chuffed! So we ate, drank and nattered before the open fire until the wee small hours. Thank you Emily, Tomaz, Brenda and Tess for a lovely, lovely night.

I must do more of this.

Learning something new every day...

I watched a Blackadder special last night (BLESS Christmas night TV!)... in the interviews at the end I couldn't work out why the guy from Time Team kept getting a guernsey. What made him such a blackadder expert anyways?

Suddenly, the penny dropped. He was Baldric!! This beautifully spoken archaeology whizz was the consonant-droppin' underling famous for his cunning plans and lucky willy. Look! (top pic below is from the timeteam website)

Who knew? Certainly not me! D'oh!

Our best UK Christmas yet...

Work schedules and flu had hitherto dampened our Christmas spirit and delayed its launch, but Ants and I finally found it after I knocked off work on Christmas Eve. I came home to discover that Ants had bought port and whiskey, Bailey's and sweet treats, even mince pies. He'd wrapped up gifts for the chooks (thank you for all the wonderful eggs) and Adrian batcat (merry christmas ratbag!) and posted notes on facebook to say my presents had finally arrived and let me know he was busy wrapping them.

It was all so festive, we just couldn't wait. Of course we pretended it was because so many European countries open gifts on Christmas eve - and because it was already christmas day in Australia and New Zealand... but actually we got like kids and were just too impatient to wait!And such pressies! Ants seems well pleased with his tickets to see Scotland play Wales at Murrayfield in February. And look at me with my new toys!
We decided to hold the rest til morning and adjourned to the pub for what turned out to be possibly the worst Irish band ever - although that didn't stop us from enjoying a good oldfashioned sing along - then decided, at 3am, that it would be a good idea to ring the folks in NZ.We started the next morning with a light but lushxurious breakfast, to mop up evidence of the night before, phoned home and opened the rest of our pressies: a pearl and amethyst necklace from my mum, and the best slippers from the out-laws in NZ: toasty warm sheepskin and exactly the right size! Adrian pusscat had more fun with the wrapping paper than her actual gift, and we played all over the loungeroom before getting ready for lunch.

Pubs in England open from noon to 2pm, and most of the establishments in Corn Street were buzzing, ours no exception. After closing, 11 of us cooked and ate christmas dinner with the landlords (Martin and Cathy), including 3 kids who all still believe in Santa, and David-from-Kenya, a friend of Martin's from his development work in Africa. It was amazing sitting in the pub in our stockingfeet, singing songs and unwrapping pressies while people came past and tried to get in cos they didn't realise it was 'family only'. We felt pretty special. Anthony got stuck early in the pub's reading room, although he emerged in time for port and cheese, served late into the night as various other regulars called in to say hello and raise a glass with friends. They were still coming in as we headed home, exhausted but happy, after our best UK Christmas yet.

Sleepy winter evenings...

Came from work yesterday to find a lazy Ants and a lazy pussycat, all cosy on the couch... I couldn't help taking this pic!

The 'best hot drink in winter' challenge...

In Germany they do gluhwein, in England it's called 'mulled wine', and if you're really lucky, you'll even find mulled cider in these parts. All are excellent at keeping the cold at bay, and lubricating vocal chords. But I have found the grandaddy of them all, hot on the heels of my first Magpie Lane gig at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford... hot Pimms (yes, that summer stuff that usually has strawberries and cucumber in), with brandy and apple juice. Mmmmm!

Happy solstice

England's long dark nights and grey days have given me new appreciation for the seasons.

This winter hasn't (yet) been as bad as some - I haven't spent 3 weeks fighting the urge to hibernate, as I did last year, and can blame the 2 week 'flu I had for having had no energy.

But 'tis no wonder ancient peoples celebrated the solstice and made offerings to the gods to ensure the spring would come again.

I've marked solstice for more than a decade - but never quite with the simple class of like this card from Tess. Cool - innit?

Wytham Wood

... is 'Oxfordshire's newest folk duo' and comprises me and my friend Jules, an extraordinary singer/songwriter/guitarist who I've been privileged to sing a number of gigs with.

A patch of remnant Oxfordshire forest might seem a strange choice of name for a Cornishman and an Australian, but Jules has lived hereabouts for nearly 20 years, attending Cornburys and Cropredys (both folk festivals held locally) and beer festivals in every pub he can find. As for me, Oxford has been my teacher and inspiration in more ways than I can count,and I'm proud to now call the shire home.

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Jules was recently invited to sing at Adderbury Folk Club's christmas fundraiser, and asked me to join him. I was in the midst of the flu, but three large glasses of mulled wine proved an effective throat relaxant, and we made it through. The Adderbury crew are a great mix of age and experience and seem to have a strong culture of fostering new folkies, and so a week later we went back to their session.

In between times, we recorded our first demo CD: 3 tracks, that I hope sound okay, cos I was still reliant on port to turn by croaky throat into anything remotely melodic. We'll know soon enough: we're hoping to try to score a few festival gigs this summer.
Our first official outing with the new name, however, was the Folly's annual Christmas bash. It's a bit of a mutual thankyou session really: to Guy and Sal of Pont Music who run the weekly open mike gigs every week, to the musicians who support them, and the landlords, Roger and Margaret, who give us a space in which to play, even though some weeks are pretty quiet. Most of all, it's a cracking night, always good for a laught. It's finally beginning to feel a bit like Christmas...

One final Warsaw moment

I made one last venture out before we headed home. Khrystene took me to the Jewish Cemetary, which has been used continuously for several centuries and contains the tombs of more than 150,000 people. It borders the area that once held the Jewish Ghetto, which was bulldozed after the Nazis had herded Warsaw's 400,000 Jewish people in early in the war, ultimately murdering or transporting every last one. There are some breathtaking memorials, including one that remembers the one million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

The world has seen many human rights abuses in my lifetime, and there have been other genocides. But not one on this scale.

We must never forget it; in case, by our silence and inaction, we somehow allow another such dictator to rise up and take power and then stay there.

A proud military history

I've heard a lot of English folk knock Poland and her people, for being an economic backwater nation with no prosperity of her own. Then in the same breath, those same English people whine about how Poles come to the UK and 'steal' jobs (research shows they work bloody hard, often in low skilled jobs that a lot of English folk are too stuck up to take on) and then send money out of the country.

I remember being amazed on learning, in Lithuania back in June, that there was a time (before hapsburgs or Valoises, and long before Britannia ruled the waves), when Poland and Lithuania were centres of culture, famed for their wealth and sophistication, at a time when England was struggling to hang on to any kind of nation in the face of repeated civil unrest and weak kings who lost the lands they'd once held in France. Only a handful of relics from that glorious heyday have survived - although given the ravages of WWII, the greatest miracle is that any of it still exists at all. But their 'east-meets-west' style and sophisticated kit still recalls vividly an era of military might, which protected a political system, culture and heritage of which all Polish people should be proud.

Ciemny piwo in Warszawa!

Ladies and gentlemen, hot on the heels of our adventures in Warsaw, allow me to introduce to you... Anthony's beer face!

Here it is below, even before he started drinking, but the sign above says he's standing in Beer Street, so perhaps he was just imagining the shape of things to come...
The photograph at the top of this page comes from Saturday night, where after watching a re-enactment of a 19th century running street battle against the Russians (the November Uprising), and getting covered in rain that froze on our hats and coats, we found a bar that servied hot wine with massive wedges of orange and beer in every shade of amber you could imagine. We got through the first round faster than you could say Ciemny piwo (dark ale)!

The photo below comes from very late on Sunday night, after I went to bed (for the first of 9 days - eugh) with a respiratory nasty, and Khrystene took Anthony to the pub. For the record, even after seeing this photo, he has NO recollection of this hat. Clearly the lads (below) did a pretty impressive job of plying him with vodka and dark beer. He was so full that he had to pull into an alleyway on the way home to answer a call of nature... and was promptly pulled over by the police, screaming in Polish until K explained he only spoke English. The Polish coppers replied that he could go home, but that he shouldn't come back until he has more culture! *Giggle*But I'm digressing already, and I haven't even told you about how it all started.

Gentle readers you may remember Khrystene's visit to Oxford back in June: well, it was our turn to return the favour, and the occasion was Khrystene's birthday. We took a long weekend and flew over on Friday, arriving just in time to drop our bags at Khrystene's o-so-funky flat in the 'real' old part of town (the bit that wasn't destroyed by the Germans, because it was filled with Russians waiting for the Germans to finish their devastation before coming in to 'liberate' the city... but more on that later), then eat something, and head out to a pub nearby to meet her friends. The place was gorgeous - high ceilings, crowded, quirky, and thick with cigarette smoke - bless those crazy non-PC European types! Khrystene had spent a small fortune (no kidding - about 35 quid!) on a cake - but WHAT a cake... you can't tell from this picture, but it was layers of gingerbread cake and nutmeggy cream, slathered in a slightly liquoricey dense black icing and 70s hotrod flamin' paint job... mmmazing!

Saturday in Poland

Perhaps not surprisingly, Saturday started late. We headed into town and Khrystene showed us round the rebuilt medieval Old Town, faithfully recreated in every detail from photographs and paintings.As this photo from Khrystene shows, the Germans quite literally left almost nothing standing when they left. Why? For the final 2 months of the war the men, women and children of Warsaw rose up against the Germans. More than 200,000 people died in 60 days, in a city with a pre-war population of 1 million (400,000 of whom were Jews, long since deported or killed in the liquidation of the Ghetto, by the time fighting broke out). Our walks took us past the memorials to the children of the uprising (above), killed carrying messages, and running errands, for the resistance, and the courtyard plaza Memorial (below). There's also an award winning museum, which we didn't make it to, although I will next time.But for me, the greatest tribute the Polish people could pay to their freedom fighters was to rebuild - and given that they were doing it in a communist state, under wary Soviet eyes and with limited finances, the fact that this city is so beautiful is perhaps nothing short of a miracle.

The Westerners who said to me that Warsaw was 'nothing much to look at' are so wrong: this place has Polish grit and determination built into every brick and slap of mortar. See, and try not to weep, as you imagine all this being built, destroyed, and built again...