On the 13th May 2011, I was lying on my
back, with my legs in the air, trying to expell a human being from my
uterus. (Yes, the inner child is notoriously shy). My
cervix was stubborn and unyielding. Two epidurals didn't work, a spinal
block didn't work. I had a mysterious infection, was running a fever and
my heart was beating too fast. I was beginning to accept the doctrine
of original sin as the only possible explanation for the bottomless well
of pain in which I was drowning.
In walked a young medical student called Sanna.
"Are you from Scotland?", I said. Well, I was high on entonox. In fact,
like all the best people, Sanna is from many places. She held my hand,
mopped my brow to cool me down, said encouraging things, remained calm.
Most importantly, she stayed by my side, for 8-10 hours, right until the
end, and then beyond. (There was another woman there too, goes by the
name of Einav.
More about her another time). We talked (between contractions), about
geopolitics and anaesthetics, about future peace and future plans. But I
think the most important quality in any caregiver, whether they are a
doctor, a nurse or a friend or partner, is something that can't be put
into words. The fact is that without Sanna, I would not have been able
to give birth normally. (Though how anyone can call *that* normal is
beyond me). By the same logic, Sanna is also responsible for the fact
that I can no longer jump on a trampoline with the carefree abandon of
yore.
When Maya was born, she was not well, so they had to take
her away from me. Einav went with Maya and the neonatologist to the
NICU. It was horrible. Worse than all the physical pain. Lying there in
shock, with the midwife's hands making sure the placenta was fully gone,
not knowing what was going on with my baby, wanting just to hold her.
Sanna was there. Maya and I to stay in the hospital for a further eight
days while she recovered, undergoing treatment that was upsetting for
both of us. Sanna visited.
There is no word in the English
language for friends you make while giving birth, but there should be.
Sanna definitely holds a unique place in our hearts. And she is an
exceptional human being, one that you want your children to marry so
that you can have her in your family. Right now she's working for a UK
charity as a paediatric emergency room doctor in Malawi. This is her
calling. Happy the patients who luck upon her, sick or injured though
they be!
Sanna visited us recently, shortly before leaving for Malawi. The children clamboured all over her, as though she was a mother lioness, and they her cubs. Did they know on
some level who she was? Or is she just universally wonderful?
This is the mystery of Sanna!
The bananas have gone brown. It must be time for... but let's do it healthierly. And vegan, of course.
FIRST: Soak three tablespoons of chia seeds in six tablespoons of water for at least 10 mins
THEN: Preheat oven to 180c (that's with fan, 190 if no fan)
4 ripe bananas
3 tablespoons oil (I use rapeseed because it's full of omega 3 but doesn't have the strong taste of hemp)
1/2 cup coconut sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 cups of flour (any flour, choice will obv affect texture and spring, I like to use white spelt and wholegrain wheat mixed up)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
1. Mash bananas - do this as roughly or as smoothly as you like, depending on how you like your BB
2. Mix soaked chia seed/water mixture, sugar and syrup, oil and vanilla essence into the bananas
3. Mix flour, cinnamon, bicarb and baking powder and salt in a separate bowl
4. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet, working in 3-4 batches so that lumps do not form and you have a uniform mixture
5. Grease and line a 2lb (1kg) loaf tin
6. Pour mixture into loaf tin
7. Put in oven, set timer for 35 mins
8. 35 mins PING check BB with toothpick to see how far along it is. Is it getting too brown but still far off being ready? If so, wrap it in tin foil before replacing in oven for another 10 mins or so.
9. Check with toothpick. When toothpick comes out clean, BB is ready.
10. Cool on rack.
This quick dish has been voted top soup of all time at my Friday night table. It's vegan, creamy and will convert into lovers those avowedly opposed to peas (I have evidence).
- 500g frozen peas (not petits pois, peas)
- 5 spring onions, sliced
- 100g pine nut kernels
- 2-3 cloves of garlic (depending on size and your preference), chopped or minced
- 1.5l hot vegetable stock (ideally Marigold vegan organic bouillon)
- Handful mint leaves (discard stems)
- olive oil
- salt
- sugar
- truffle oil
Saute the spring onions in olive oil on low heat for about 8 minutes until softened but not browned. Add garlic and saute for another minute or so. Add pinch of salt. Add peas and stir until they're evenly coated. Pour in vegetable stock. Bring to boil then simmer for 10 mins (or less if you're using a pressure cooker, the best way). Turn off heat. Pour in pine nut kernels. Blitz with immersion blender. Add 2 tsps - 1tbsp sugar and about 8 mint leaves, blitzing and tasting as you go. Final blitz and season to taste. Drizzle each portion with truffle oil before serving (this step matters).
These vegan brownies are full of healthier wholesomer (!) ingredients and they go down a storm with vegans and non-vegans alike. So easy too, literally 30 mins including prep:
250g plain flour (all purpose)
100g dark muscovado sugar
250g coconut sugar
250ml coconut oil (melt so that it mixes nicely)
250ml water
1 tsp baking powder
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
65g carob powder (you could use cocoa too (or in combination), but carob has that extra sweetness to give the less sweet coconut sugar a lift)
Preheat oven to 180c. Mix ingredients - use a mixer with paddle attachment if you have one, but not necessary. Spread in a tin (I use three 7'' x 4.5'' foil brownie trays so I can freeze some to take later as gifts). Bake for 20-25 mins. Done!
I sewed this dress for Maya's third birthday party this Sunday. She hasn't seen it yet. I had to hide it because she kept trying to wear it before it was sewn together, pins and all. She loves pink. Nothing to be done about it. Pink.
It's the Oliver + S Garden Party dress and the fabric is from the Wee Wonder collection by Sarah Jane.
GNOCCHI (do this first)
one butternut squash
two fists' worth of potatoes
flour (i used plain white, but could be gluten free too)
salt
1. bake potatoes and butternut squash until soft
2. peel then mash thoroughly
3. add flour until you form a soft dough
4. add salt to taste
5. divide dough into four and roll each into a 1'' wide rope
6. cut rope into 1/2'' pieces and squidge/pinch gnocchi, or mark with a fork if you like
7. place gnocchi on one or two floured trays that will fit in your freezer
8. freeze for an hour or more
PUREE:
one leek, sliced
400g black salsify, peeled and chopped (or use jerusalem artichoke)
bunch of asparagus, chopped (snap off woody stalks)
vegetable stock (about 250ml or more)
1 tbsp nutritional yeast
60ml olive oil (a lot i know)
optional: fried sage leaves, truffle oil
optional: fried sage leaves, truffle oil
1. sautee leeks in oil until soft (medium-low heat)
2. add salsify and stir
3. cover with stock, add nutritional yeast, simmer
4. when salsify is 6 mins or so away from being ready, add asparagus
6. when everything cooked, puree with blender
COOK GNOCCHI
1. Bring two kettle-fulls of water to the boil and salt it well (at least 3 litres)
2. Plunge half of the gnocchi into the water and set timer for 5 mins
3. gnocchi are ready when they have been floating on the surface for 2 mins
4. mix with puree and enjoy
top with fried sage leaves and truffle oil.
seriously people you have to try this, do not be put off by any perceived fiddliness.
There's a jellyfish that knows the secret
of ETERNAL LIFE and is invading
our oceans, endlessly replicating
itself by having SEX and reverting
back to a prepubescent polyp state,
causing its numbers to rocket beyond
its home waters of the Caribbean,
said The Sun on Tuesday, page twenty three.
It does this through the cell development
process of transdifferentiation,
said The Telegraph that very same day.
Someone on The Times comment forum wrote:
The good news is you can live forever,
The bad news is you have to be a jellyfish.
This poem was originally published in Stand Magazine
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dlatane/stand-maga/V_10%284%29/contents_10%284%29.html
Would you snatch a book from my boy’s hands,
As he sat pulling apart each word, limb from limb,
As he sat pulling apart each word, limb from limb,
Stumbling on phonics, cuddled against my breast?
Would you prise his little paws off the cover,
Ignore his baffled screams, my tearful pleas as you
Peel away bendy fingers, made sticky by a day’s play?
Would you snatch it if snatching made it tear,
Left him grasping a crumpled cover, bereft,
While you walk away triumphant, dropping pages like a trail?
Just how far would you go?
How about the books already in his head,
The bedtime stories lovingly tethered to his soul;
Would you steal those too? Why let them be?
Because you know, books are not like bees.
They don’t lie down and die after a single sting, nor fizzle out
like a match that burns to a searing stub at your fingers.
No. When you steal a book you steal it again and again.
You steal it from every child whose face ever pressed up
Against a rainy window pane, bored and poor and trapped.
You lock him in, in a way that no wall ever could.
You set up fences he can’t even see, burn ladders he didn’t know he had.
And you do it to his children and his children’s children.
For eternity.
That is what you are doing to us.
So I say: steal my baby’s books if you dare,
But first look at him, look at his big brown eyes,
And tell him what you’re going to do.
Say to him: Child, I am taking from you this book
that you are reading.
While you walk away triumphant, dropping pages like a trail?
Just how far would you go?
How about the books already in his head,
The bedtime stories lovingly tethered to his soul;
Would you steal those too? Why let them be?
Because you know, books are not like bees.
They don’t lie down and die after a single sting, nor fizzle out
like a match that burns to a searing stub at your fingers.
No. When you steal a book you steal it again and again.
You steal it from every child whose face ever pressed up
Against a rainy window pane, bored and poor and trapped.
You lock him in, in a way that no wall ever could.
You set up fences he can’t even see, burn ladders he didn’t know he had.
And you do it to his children and his children’s children.
For eternity.
That is what you are doing to us.
So I say: steal my baby’s books if you dare,
But first look at him, look at his big brown eyes,
And tell him what you’re going to do.
Say to him: Child, I am taking from you this book
that you are reading.
Say: Child, forget these pictures.
Say: Child, snuff out those rhymes.
And tell him: Don’t ask me what happens next.
There are no more pages to turn.
Because: Child, this is the end.
Then sing to him:
Lavender’s blue dilly dilly,
Lavender’s green.
I stole your books, dilly dilly
Cos I am mean.
Sing:
Call up your men, dilly dilly
Call up your crooks,
Some to build pyres, dilly dilly
Some to burn books
Some to break glass, dilly dilly
Some to crush bricks,
While me and mine, dilly dilly
Still get our kicks.
Then take a long look at his big brown eyes.
Just look.
And see, just how much you are taking from us.
Say: Child, snuff out those rhymes.
And tell him: Don’t ask me what happens next.
There are no more pages to turn.
Because: Child, this is the end.
Then sing to him:
Lavender’s blue dilly dilly,
Lavender’s green.
I stole your books, dilly dilly
Cos I am mean.
Sing:
Call up your men, dilly dilly
Call up your crooks,
Some to build pyres, dilly dilly
Some to burn books
Some to break glass, dilly dilly
Some to crush bricks,
While me and mine, dilly dilly
Still get our kicks.
Then take a long look at his big brown eyes.
Just look.
And see, just how much you are taking from us.
I wrote this poem in anger, when the council tried to close our local library. The library was finally saved, thanks to Occupy squatters, who lived in the building for several months, and local activists. We owe them forever.
Today (23rd March 2014) the community celebrated 80 years of Friern Barnet Library. Here's to 80 more.
"Mummy, when your mum died, did she have bones?
Matan is four. So let's turn that macabre question into an opportunity for education!
"Yes. But everyone has bones, not only dead people. Come here, let me show you. These are your bones, can you feel that? If you didn't have bones, you wouldn't be able to stand up. You'd be all floppy, and wobbly like jelly. Show me what you would look like if you didn't have bones."
He crumples onto the floor. I crumple too.
"But mummy, where did your mummy die? I mean where? Do you know where?"
"You mean which road? It's called Cromwell Road, near Aunty Olivia's house."
"Do you know exactly where? Will you show me?"
"Yes, I'll show you."
"But mummy. Mums look left and right, don't they?"
Which is worse? To tell a child that grown-ups don't always do the right thing, or to tell them that doing the right thing won't always protect you? Either answer is crushing, and four is too early to be crushed like that. The clock of his attention span starts ticking loudly. "But mummy, they do, don't they?"
"Yes, my darling. Mummies look left and right. It's very important to look left and right. I always look left and right. I'll always be here for you. I love you." Inside I hope that my bluff remains flesh for as long as he needs me. We cuddle, but I can't tell which of us is squeezing tightest.
Yesterday evening, Maya, who is two, found a photo of my mother in an old chest of drawers. My beautiful, twenty-year-old mother. My mother in the life she had before me, in the hands of my daughter who came after she was gone. Only our navels bear fleshy testimony to this sad game of generational tag.
In the photo, her face is turned slightly to the side and illuminated from the right. It was taken in a professional studio, in black and white, and printed on the kind of heavy matt paper used by people in the days when photos meant something. It's the first time I've ever seen it. By the date scrawled on it, I work out it was taken just after she left my two-year-old half sister with her ex-husband's parents, and then moved to London alone, masquerading as single and unencumbered. Not a trace of that story can be read on her face. I'll never know why that photo was taken, nor why then. Some questions no longer have anyone alive to answer them.
Holding the photo, Maya is running towards me in the way that only toddlers do. Everything urgent, everything important, everything new.
"Mummy, is the car coming to get her?" she asks, and I can hear a note of concern in her small voice.
Two months shy of her third birthday, she has no intimation of the exhaustible and non-repeatable nature of time. No linearity, no 'then', only the NOW of the NOW. Still strong in her is that prelapserian ignorance that, growing up, we shed. Her question immediately makes me think of Roland Barthes (hey, my two-year-old is a prodigy!). Looking at the 47-year-old photo, I say to myself: My mother is dead and she is going to die. The car has come and it is going to come.
"Mummy, can you put the photo where we can see it?"
"Ok my darlings, but not in the bedroom." (This unexpected superstition embarrasses me, even in front of myself).
Later, I lie down in between them in the bed they share. "Sing us your mummy's song," they say, merrily. I start stroking their little heads, thinking that if we can all just stay alive for long enough so that none of our deaths is obscene, then I do not need anything else in this world.
Show me the way to go home / I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
I can't believe it's me who's doing the stroking.
Where is my mother's hand?