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January 2012

A review of the Cornish Guardian.

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I don’t know much about you, in fact I know just about nothing about you but the one thing that I do know is that you enjoy reading the Cornish Guardian. This Christmas I got the chance to actually sit down and read the whole thing cover to cover and really enjoyed myself.  It’s always a shame though that the property section of the Christmas edition is so light.  If there is one thing I love about the paper it’s flicking through the property pages and choosing my next dream house, in a sense I’m glad I’m not rich because I’d be spoilt for choice, how would I decide between 20 acres of moorland or beach frontage?

The Christmas paper is also unusual in that we get to read the writings of the other local columnists. I think the people of Bodmin, Lostwithiel and Looe are well served with their columnists and it’s nice to see the standard I have to try to keep up to, it’s also nice to see what is going on in the other areas beyond the standard news stories.  One place that is great to find out what is going on is the letters page.  This is the section that I always turn to first because it makes sense of the news stories and also has the bonus of some days making me laugh out loud. Last week we had the treat of a councillor getting in a huff because praise for some scheme hadn’t been duly allocated to him but to a fellow councillor. His letter was full of “me, me, me” and outraged indignation, this week was even better when the second councillor retaliated saying that the first councillor was misguided and that HE was the one who did all the work, in a rare case of one-upmanship the councillor backdated his claim of interest to when he was a “young lad”. I have never read two letters more full of their own self-importance. I’m looking forward to a letter in next week’s paper from a councillor claiming to be Spartacus.  It is funny but really guys you’re councillors. Is this seemly? Is it helpful? Does it matter?  Surely the bigger picture is that the event was a success? Like their letters, I often find that I’m at odds with the political columns none more so than Dick Cole.  He always writes eloquently and persuasively but I generally find myself disagreeing – not this week though – how could George Osborne suggest creating “low pay zones” for public service workers.  The only decent wages in Cornwall tend to be in the public service, we should be trying to raise everyone up to their pay and working conditions not pull them down.

Another letter that struck a chord was from Keeley Allen, who volunteers at a local animal shelter. They want to employ her but have no funding, she wants to work for them and stop claiming benefits so the pair of them have written in asking if anyone knows where they may get funding for £5K a year. I don’t know the ins and outs of this story but it comes across as one of those situations where you think the system just isn’t working.  By the same token Keeley is trying to fix it, so good luck to her and I’m also keeping my fingers crossed for Marna who is still waiting to have her furniture fumigated. Her letter was informative, polite and nicely ironic, I have no doubt that the people at Ocean who really do care about their residents will have sorted out the glitch by now.  So that’s my review of last week’s paper I hope you enjoyed it (the paper) as much as I did.

Minor niggles and petty minded ejits.

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Well it’s been a week of little frustrations.   I ordered some books for a birthday present for one of my son’s friends. I ordered a special next day delivery so that they would arrive in time. Ordering books is something that I’m pretty good at. I’m used to it.  What I’m not used to is delivery companies failing to deliver. I would say that 98% of my deliveries arrive without fuss or fanfare but the 2% that don’t turn up when you want to? Well, you can guarantee that they are the ones that are time sensitive.  So of course these books failed to turn up on day one, day two or day three, the party came and went and there’s me, a bookseller, unable to provide books for a birthday present. Only mildly annoying then.

Talking about the shop our scaffolding is still up, not the end of the world and it does mean that the work is getting done.  Well our work is all done but our neighbour has bigger problems so we just have to wait.  Hardly his fault and it needs to be done properly but you know how it is.  It still irks. I want to show off my newly painted shop to everyone. Which leads me to my next frustration, my scaffolding is up but my Christmas decorations at home still aren’t.  A leak in the house has meant that our sitting room ceiling is sagging.  We got a plasterer to have a quick look, he took a quick look and then he left telling us that what I thought was a quick dot and dab job was actually going to involve taking down the coving as well as a good portion of the ceiling and to call our insurers.

So now I am waiting for the loss adjuster, talk about spirally out of control.  And whilst I wait we can’t put up the decorations, well what’s the point if we have to take it all down again. We can’t dress the tree or deck the hall and our fa la la la la is definitely out of tune. Little things really can grind you down and then in amongst all the stupid minor inconveniences comes an act of a utter pettiness  and you wonder why they bothered.

My mother  went to catch the bus into town the day after her birthday.  Now it may shock you to discover my mother has a bus pass, well it does me as it means I’m not 18 anymore but that’s one of my other minor frustrations. Anyway, she got on the bus, handed over her bus pass and was told it had expired yesterday and had to be withheld. Furthermore if she wished to travel into town she had to pay. As she didn’t have her purse on her she had to step off.  Now I ask you?  What was the point in that?  It’s not as if her birthday made her a year younger and no longer eligible for a bus pass.  Why couldn’t the driver simply have told her that it had expired and that she needed to refresh it?  Why treat her like some sort of fare dodger?  My mother wasn’t bothered, she just brushed him off as a jumped up jobs worth but I got annoyed on her behalf.

So there we go a week of niggles and frustrations. Next week will be a doddle. Ho ho ho!

Killing each other over the Christmas Cake.

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Once again cooking the Christmas cake led to family rows and it was all my fault.   For some reason I expect my family to all gather round as we chop the peel and tell jokes, Bing Crosby hands out the sherry and Clare College, Cambridge join in on the songs.  Snow gently falls against the window panes and we warm our hands by the fire. I know I’m raising my expectations too high and I have no issue with high standards, it’s just that when they unsurprisingly fail to deliver I’m disappointed.  I may be able, somehow, to get one of the most beautiful choirs in Britain to squeeze into my kitchen, I may even be able to raise crooners from the grave but snow? In November? In Cornwall?  Some miracles even I can’t perform.  The other miracle I can’t perform is to get my boys to stay in the same room for longer than 30 minutes without fighting, then I get crabby and then they get crabbier and Bing Crosby is grabbing his coat and high tailing it out into the rain.

Anyway, by the time the cake was ready to bake I had left it too late, of course that didn’t stop me and in the oven it went. A potentially huge mistake as 2 hours later I really needed to go to sleep and the cake still had a good hour to go.  In desperation, I turned the oven down to .5 and went to sleep wondering what I would come down to in the morning.    Sometimes though life is on your side, we all woke up to a house smelling of brandy and cloves, fruits and nuts and just the very essence of Christmas.

The reason I’m waffling on about the cake is how important cooking is in a family. My youngest son’s school had a baking day last week.  Virtually the whole day was set aside to make bread.  In the morning they looked at grains and considered the role of grain within an economy and looked at the historical development of different grains around the world.  Then they set to grinding some and then they started baking. Baking was treated as a science lesson, they experimented with chemical reactions and learnt about live cultures and how they work, they also experimented with the physical properties of an oven and temperature and they looked at the biological impact of bread as a food source upon the body.  All day long the top three year groups worked together, mixing, kneeding and baking and every child brought home their own loaf of bread.  It was so delicious that it barely lasted till tea time.  This was in a primary school where they have greater flexibility with how they run their school day or their curriculum.

Contrast it with my older son in secondary school. In the first year his cookery lessons seemed to be all about assemblage. Create a salad, create a fruit salad, design a sandwich. It was not edifying. This year he has been allowed to approach the ovens but not for long.  Every offering that the poor boy has brought home has been undercooked. You can see his frustration as he comes in and tells us not to bother eating it as he had to take it out before it was ready.  It’s maddening but the way I look at it is that at least he knows it’s undercooked. I’m not impressed with the current education system and the fact that my sons are currently having to go through it makes me even more unimpressed which is why I try to get them involved in as much cookery as possible at home.  The problem is I may end up killing them first.