Day 63 - Spice

 SPICE

Prompt - Spice : Write about flavours and tastes of a favourite spice of yours.

'A' favourite spice?? just one?  That makes this one of the toughest challenges yet!  I love my spices and what they bring to our meals.  Spices and I go way back.

One of the best decisions of my life was to take an Indian Cookery course at night school.  That was in 1991, or maybe '92.  Once a week I'd drive to Ainsdale High School with the ingredients specified the week before and come back with a new dish I'd learned.  (I didn't always return home with it, for this was during the period leading up to my divorce, so I'd often take it to friends to sample.)  The course was just 'Indian' so it didn't specify which regional style we were learning, but it was a good starting point for my journey.

That course gave me two lasting benefits.  It introduced me to Mattas in Liverpool's Bold Street a wonderful Asian grocer which had an array of spices I'd never seen before.  And it gave me the confidence to experiment with spices in my own more mundane recipes.  It was also a gateway into a wider range of spicy dishes, mostly Indian but from other places too.  I started to build a collection of cookery books, notably from The Curry Club, which broadened my repertoire, improved my skills and increased my confidence.  Now I've been cooking curries for near enough three decades and feel at home doing so, with some of my favourites being dishes I've invented for myself.  My creamy mixed fish curry is always popular.  

Funnily enough it's one that doesn't use what I think might be my favourite spice.  Although cumin (and chilli of course) is probably the one I use most often, for it works in all sorts of styles of cuisine, I love finding uses for fennel seeds.  That aniseed undertone is a sensation in so many dishes, not just the Indian recipes that call for it.  There's a sweetness and fragrance to this spice, but without the sometimes overpowering taste of star anise.  I like to toss a spoonful into the water I'm boiling to cook rice.  Delicious with a chilli, introducing little taste bubbles into the overall dish.  Great with fish.  Indeed I have ground the seeds and sprinkled it on cod to be baked in the oven.  Just that and lemon juice and some black pepper.  I'm making myself hungry now.

Of course if you are no fan of aniseed this will not be for you.  I recall the small brown sweets known as aniseed balls from my childhood, and I loved them then, so it's always been one of 'my' flavours.  Those small pale green pods will be a part of my culinary repertoire until I finally have to give up the spatula.

Day 62 - Slip Up

 SLIP UP

Prompt - Slip Up : Write about making mistakes

Cliche time.  We all make mistakes.  A frequently used excuse and an undeniable truism.  To be human is to make mistakes, because we so often act on the basis of incomplete information, and seen through the prism of our own prejudices and experiences.  The trick isn't to cover them up, but to accept them as part of life, both from others and yourself.  Not always the easiest path to take.

But I can say one thing with certainty.  If there's one mistake in my life I wish I'd never made it was my first marriage.  But I made it and that was my choice.  Be imperfect.

Day 61 - Drama

 DRAMA

Prompt - Drama : Write about a time when you got stuck in between two parties fighting with each other.

Midnight.  It had been a long shift.  The restaurant had been packed that night and I hadn't stopped for five hours.  I hated Saturdays.  I was about to realise what an understatement that was.

We left when we'd cleaned up our own section, so it was usually odd ones and twos leaving for half an hour.  I was one of the last.  Stepped out the back door, hearing it clang shut behind me, and breathed in the cool night air.  It might be city centre air, but after the intense heat and steaminess of the kitchen it was like being up Ben Nevis.  As I looked up to the sky, I heard them before looking round.  A grumbling undertone, a questioning, the sound of tension.

At either end of the alley were five or six guys.  Hoodies, trackie bottoms, white trainers.  And, as I looked more intently, knives.  

"Where'd he fukin come frae?"  That from my left.

"Is he one a yous?"  From the right.

"Poofy wee git like that?  You takin the piss man?"

"Aye, looks like one o yous, eh?" 

Both groups took a few steps closer. I tried to remember how to breathe.  Gang fight?  Couldn't be anything else.  We all knew it happened round here, but so far our alley had been spared, at least as far as we knew.  Now they were here, and I'd walked out into the middle of it.  My brain fast forwarded through my options.  Didn't take long.

I could bang on the door and hope someone was there to let me back in.  But those blades were only about four metres away now, and they could be on me much quicker than anyone could open up.  Or I could try to talk my way out of it.  There was nowhere to run.  I talked.

"I'm no wi anyone.  Just finished my job for the night, I only want to get to my bed, so if you guys would like to let me pass..."  I looked left.  I looked right.  Passing through didn't look like an available option either.  

"You want him?"  From the left.

"Naw, you have him.  Needs to be oot the way and we can dae the business."  I didn't think being oot the way sound too enticing.

"Come on guys, I'm no a part o this.  You let me get hame and I'll leave you to get on wi... it."

"Is he takin the piss?"  From the right.

"Sounds like it, eh?"  From the left.

"You're deid pal."  Finality, from the right.  The one that talked stepped towards me, blade rising.

Right then the door behind me opened.  Fear turned me into an escape ninja.  Whirled round, shoved poor old Guy back and jumped in, grabbing the door bar behind me and pulling it tight shut.  

"What the...?"  Guy looked up from the floor, looking almost as scared of me as I had been a second before.  I told him the story.  We listened.  Talking.  Only talking.  My sudden appearance and vanishing act seemed to have created allies of a sort.  Eventually the voices ceased and we looked at each other, both sure that we weren't sure if it would be safe to venture that way again. 

We went back through the kitchen the restaurant.  Only Tony and Bella left.  Our faces told them there had been trouble.  Tony called the police, they came to tell us there was nobody there and no signs of trouble, and they'd start checking round our back way more often.  They even drove me home.  I hoped I wouldn't need any more lifts. 

Day 60 - Handle With Care

 HANDLE WITH CARE

Prompt - Handle With Care : Write about a very fragile or delicate object

"Pete - how are we going to carry that?"  I looked round to see Clodagh pointing at the item I'd spent the day trying to avoid.  It had been placed into the corner for safety, but now we were getting close to having cleared the room it was back as an issue.

"Take it with us in the car?"  She didn't even need to say anything.  I knew how daft an idea that sounded, taking a thing of that size and fragility on seventy mile trip with a couple of five year olds.  "OK, so we leave it to the pros.  But pack it up ourselves?"

The object in question was an intricately decorated pot about seventy centimetres high and thirty five in diameter at it's widest point.  It had been a wedding present from my folks, a huge surprise at the time, and we both loved and feared it.  Because this wasn't something they'd picked up at the garden centre.  This was a Gerry Mayson.

That was a name I first heard when I was sixteen.  As part of the utterance "Bloody hell - Gerry Mayson?  Really?  What is the bloody Turner Prize anyway?" from behind my father's newspaper.  The tabloid lowered to reveal a stunned facial expression and no further sound for a few seconds.  Then he told us who this Gerry guy was.

They'd been at school together.  When I say together it was only that they were in the same year.  Gerald had been one of the bright kids, one of the poncey arty ones that my dad's crowd shunned.  There might even have been a bit of bullying, although my father didn't quite phrase it that way.  But they had ended up going to hospital together, both having been in the wrong place when light fitting fell from the ceiling, and that created a bit of a bond.  Not enough of a bond that they kept in touch after school days, but sufficient for Dad to feel some connection to what he'd just read.

Gerry Mayson had won the Turner Prize for his innovative ceramic creations and the social and political commentary they resonated with.  My determinedly lowbrow father couldn't have told a Rembrandt from a Kawasaki, but even he realised this was a big thing, and he felt some pride by association.  But I knew it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to him.

I was wrong.  When an exhibition of Mayson's work came to town he insisted on a family outing.  And there was the man himself, revisiting his childhood haunts.  That hospital trip came in handy, allowing Dad to remind the potter of their common experience, and a surprisingly unlikely relationship followed.  For me, with artistic pretensions my parents had never understood, this was a godsend, and suddenly my painting wasn't just the "fannying about" it had been previously.  Gerry got my folks to take me seriously.  Better still, Gerry took me seriously, liked what i was doing and provided me with all sorts of help.  I would never have got to where I am now without a bit of potter patronage.

So when my parents presented us with the pot a few days before our wedding day I was bursting with emotions.  Pleasure at them coming up with a gift so imaginative and personal.  Terror at them coming up with a gift so simultaneously beautiful, fragile and uniquely irreplaceable in the universe.  Bafflement at them coming up with a gift that must have required my mother to fellate Gerry Mayson every week for a year for him to present us with a large, shapely, glazed tribute to our connubial moment.   And now it had to survive a house move.

So we found a box.  We put it in the box nestled in bubble wrap, swaddled in towels, cocooned in a duvet.  And then into another, spacier box that was really a wardrobe and gripped the smaller massive box in five winters worth of coats and anoraks and assorted cushions in floral prints and jazzy designs.  It was the Amazon package of the house removal world.

And we let these professional carrying shifting people take it away and into their lorry and out of sight and imagined the pot in a million shards in a motorway pile up.  People died in the pile up but all our concerns went into the colourful fragments waiting to be unearthed by firemen.  They say moving house is one of the most stressful events in anyone's life.  And most people, I suspect, don't have a big shiny multi coloured pot, lovingly created by an internationally renowned artist, that commemorates the biggest day of their lives and is to be there until they become corpses.  Do they?

We got in the car.  We remembered to bring the children.  We drove the seventy miles, making reassuring noises, smiling reassuring smiles.  We watched the professionals unload.  We watched them unload the wardrobe containing the box containing the pot and the cold weather garments and the soft furnishings.  We couldn't hear any rattling.

Settle in first.  You have to, don't you?  Kettle, plates, get a takeaway, let the kids be excited, makeshift bed making, get the kids into bed, pour a large drink.  It's ten thirty.  The wardrobe is sitting there.  We talk about putting it off until the morning, but know we won't.  I open the wardrobe.

Out they come.  Cushions and coats.  The big box.  A duvet.  Towels.  That's handy, we need towels.  And then, bubble jacketed, the pot.  There have been no untoward noises.  We can breathe, almost.  Unwrap, carefully, fretfully.  It is as was.  No chips, no scratches, no hint of potlessness.  We can go to bed, we can sleep.  I will not have to pretend to my parents that we've moved to Peru.  I can face Gerry Mayson.

Day 59 - Refreshed

 REFRESHED

Prompt - Refreshed : Write a poem about a time you really felt refreshed and renewed.  Maybe it was a dip in a pool on a hot summer day, a drink of lemonade, or other situation that helped you relax and start again.

Egg frying streets

A sun that heats

Me up until I melt

Shirts stick like peel

Making me feel

Like an over roasted Celt

Then late one night

I'm trying to write

And hear a pattering sound

It swells, it hammers

It calls, it yammers

There's water covered ground

Though people say

A sunny day 

Is always for the best

Too much of sun

Is never fun

Rain comes as welcome guest

It might be late

But this was fate

Drawing me to the downpour

I walk alone

Soaked to the bone

And feel my spirits soar

Refreshed again

I praise the rain

For bringing cool and succour

It's nature's way

She's trying to say

There is no one to best her

I'll be the same

When the name

Of lockdown's in the past

In a flood of gigs

We'll trough like pigs

Live music's back at last

Day 58 - Darkness

 DARKNESS

Prompt - Darkness : Write a poem or journal entry inspired by what you can't see

You Can't See Me

What you see

Is

My size

My colour

My clothes

My hair

My walk

My job

My home

What you don't see

Is

My thoughts

My feelings

My passions

My fears

My confidence

My talents

My love

Me

Day 57 - Alarm Clock

 ALARM CLOCK

Prompt - Alarm Clock : Write about waking up.

There was a noise that wouldn't stop.  Leading to irritation.  Puzzlement. Fog.  Alex turned over, hoping it would simply stop, go away, leave him alone.  Why was it happening?  Slowly the power of his brain was able to shrug off sleep enough to realise that it was his alarm going off.  And then he remembered why.

It was a shock.  A double shock.  The first part of that being the alarm itself.  Nine years since he'd retired, after forty three of early mornings, getting into work by eight, getting the job done.  Obeying the alarm that woke him and Mags at six thirty, day after day after day.  When he'd left they'd sat down and discussed what they were going to do with this new life together.  And what they wouldn't do.  Being slaves to the early morning bell was one of the first to go.  

Like being reborn.  Their days felt relaxed, pleasurable, actually theirs to own and use.  They had fun, something that had seemed unimaginable for decades.  They no longer had to endure all those external pressures, so it felt like every day was a weekend, except that even their weekends had been busy, especially when Greta was young.  Eight and bit years they had, then Mags was taken from him, suddenly.  Heart failure, when they'd been on a fairground ride together, holding hands.  The shock still hadn't left him, eight months later, but he always smiled to think she'd died doing something she'd loved.  There had been a good few fairgrounds before that.  

But there had been a hole in their life too.  A Greta shaped hole.  Their daughter had cut them out of her world a few years before he'd retired, unable to take any more of what she always saw as her mother's interference in her life.  Alex had tried to fill in the cracks, but didn't have the diplomatic skills.  He knew Greta was right, but he could never have told his wife that.  Loyalty was strong within him.  They found what they needed to enjoy their life without their daughter, but it was always in the background.

He called Greta when Mags died, but she'd changed her number and never told them.   He wasn't even sure where she lived now.  Until last week.  He was wary of unexpected calls from strange numbers, but something made him pick up this one.  It was Greta.  She'd only just learned of her mother's death, she was in Perth now, she had two daughters and would Alex want to meet them?  There was more, but those were the bits he focussed on.  He had granddaughters, he would get to see them, and his daughter wanted him back in her life.  It wasn't life with Mags, but it sounded like it might be a bloody good compensation.

All this flooded back into his shuffling mind, gradually absorbing the day ahead.  Get himself up, and out, and on board the 09.45 from platform eight.  And see what this day brought.  Another new life?  His alarm clock had never been so important.

Day 56 - Photograph

 

PHOTOGRAPH

Prompt - Photograph : Write a story or journal entry influenced by a photograph you see online or in a magazine

I returned to the ranks of the occasional kilt wearers almost four years ago, after long ago given up on them after an embarrassing incident almost half a century before.  The initial motivation was joining in the spirit of event when I did Kiltwalk, but I found I really enjoyed wearing my kilt at other times too.  It does change the way you feel about yourself when you wear one, and it seems to alter the way other people see you too, but it's  pleasure in itself, a totally different feel to walking around in my usual denim.  

They are (were? will be? what tense do we use in these strange covid times of lockdown?) a common enough sight on the streets of Edinburgh these days, and worn in such a variety of styles that there are no limits to their appropriateness.  Changed times from my younger days when if you saw a man in a kilt he'd invariably fit into one of four categories.  He was attending a wedding, in a pipe band, in the military, or, worst of all, an American tourist seeking out his 'heritage'.  They would be worn as part of a more or less formal outfit.  

Changed times where tee shirt and walking boots are now the most commonly sighted combo.  Kilts abound at Scotland rugby matches, at parties, on the street, on days around town and evening sout on the town.  They have been adopted by younger Scots guys as a marker of their nationality, in a UK that is rapidly falling apart.  They are still worn to weddings, but in increasingly different outfits.  Many still hire, but ownership is increasing.  Dress it up, dress it down.  Wear a cargo kilt.  They have long since shed tartan as their sole design, and you can easily pick up a camo kilt if that's what lights your bunnet.  And kilted yoga gurus and fitness instructors, spartanly dressed in tartan and boots, have gained a big following online.

But none of them sum up the changed social attitudes of the twenty first century better than the kilted photos I've chosen today.  It's called progress.

Day 55 - Holding Hands

 HOLDING HANDS

Prompt - Holding hands : Write about the first time you help someone's hand

It had felt like it would never get to this point.  It had felt like we would always get to this point.  It felt... like a beginning, except it wasn't, it was just one more step in the story, a story which nobody knew how and when the end would ever come.

I saw her first from behind, walking down the corridor and heading for the door into the sun.  In an office of more than six hundred random bodies it took something to stand out.  So what was it that made me stare?  The walk?  The scarf artfully arranged across the shoulders?  The hair?  All and none of these?  I was no believer in the arcane notion of fate, but there can still be a sense of moment, of now and it meaning more than the moment before.  Mundanely special.

No turn of the head as she left the building.  I followed her, pleased to see she was heading in the direction of where my car lay parked.  As, no doubt, did hers.  Or was someone waiting for her?  I put on a bit more speed, so I was passing her just after we'd crossed the road, but didn't dare look across.  Instead I went to my car, put the key in the lock (no remotes in those olden times!), and looked up.  In time to see her pass.  She looked at me.  And looked away.  No smile.  No sense of connection.  On her side.  But me?  I... needed to know.  I had no idea what it was, but I knew I needed to know it.

I sat in my car until she passed, noting colour, model, registration.  Bright orange, so it would be easy to spot.  If I needed to spot it.  Drove home, sat, pondered.  A couple of hours before my wife got in, Tuesday was her late night, and dinner wouldn't take me long, so thinking time was available.  

Who was she?  Where in the huge complex we'd emerged from did she work?  Name, rank, serial number?  And the most baffling scary question of them all - how could I get to talk to her?  I found an answer.  I knew it wasn't really an answer, but it was the only one I'd got.  A letter.  Left under the wiper behind that orange bonnet.  Saying... Hope flew out of one window and in another.  saying whatever came into my head, however mad.  Anonymous.  A dramatic gesture of... bafflement?  I had no idea what any of this really meant.

The letter was written, placed, seen to have vanished, presumably read.  But what next?  Even if she hadn't been horrified by the strangeness of the contents, she had no idea who I was?  Or I her.  But I would.  However long it took.

Months passed.  Bit by bit I filled in the jigsaw.  She worked in the same building as me, and there was the sky, dotted with clouds, peering out.  She worked on the first floor, and there was the grass at the foot of the picture, a hint of the dogs legs in sight.  She often worked late, and the dogs, and the sheep they herded, came to life.  Walking with a colleague we passed her on the stairs, they exchanged greetings, and from that I found out her name.  I had my shepherd, I had the image on the box lid.  But I still didn't know what to do with it.

My own job suddenly offered a link.  I went into a room looking for a woman I needed to talk to  and there she was.  There they both were, for the person I sought was her boss.  Was she looking at me as I had my tedious conversation?  Was she aware of how much I wanted to look at her?  I risked a smile in that direction as I left, and almost skipped out the door when it was returned.  

I walked along that corridor often enough, trying to look purposeful, but there always seemed to be someone still with her in that room.  Until one day.  When I couldn't do it, and walked on.  Why risk my expectations?  I sulked back to my room, and trembled in fury at my own cowardice.

That corridor drew me back.  That room, and the mystery behind a desk.  And one evening I found myself in there and asking for her boss and I knew she'd gone home and it would just be us and I babbled something and she babbled something and together we babbled and then I left.  No sulk this time, just a dire need to draw in breath, to make myself believe that I'd done what I didn't think I'd do and wanted to do again.  Is breathlessness the same as love?

A week passed, I returned, our babbling now more purposeful, more probing, finding out, facts, the trivia of lives, tentative bond building.  Another visit.  Another.  Conscious that this would soon be seen by people, the wrong people, that stories would flow.  That this needed to come to some kind of ending, or beginning.  We talked again.  We talked about that need to end.  We talked with sadness.  The point was reached.  My hand met hers, held on.  She squeezed back.  I suggested lunch.  Some time.  She said no.  She said no.  I let go.  The end had come.

As I reached the door she said "But I do want to see you again".  I looked back, I looked into those tentatively smiling eyes, I looked at the hand I'd just held.  The end hadn't come.  I was looking at a beginning.

Day 54 - Dear Diary

 DEAR DIARY

Prompt - Dear Diary : Write a poem or short story about a diary entry you've read or imagined.

Anna came to me in Bravo blue

Said the only one I want is you

Took me up unto her spire

Promised she would take me higher

The bedroom seemed just like my folks'

Anna likes her little jokes

We loved in every way and fashion

Hours filled with steamy passion

But Charlie Drake quite spoiled the mood

His interjection just plain rude

Insists he showed us magic tricks

While I just wanted Anna's licks

Her touch, her taste, her wiles in bed

But Charlie froze the moment dead

So now I miss my sex inspector

The wee man proved he's no respecter

Of dreams that lead to copulation

Illusion ending our flirtation

Though Anna is in pride of place

I wish I'd forget Charlie's face

This nonsense was based on a diary entry of mine from 1987 (which I had been data capturing the day before writing the above) describing a strange dream I'd remembered when I woke.  Being seduced by Anna Carteret in her police uniform from her character in Juliet Bravo, she took me into the upstairs of her home, which resembled a church, only for her bedroom to look exactly like that of my parents.  We made love, my diary says I enjoyed it, but it was brought to an end by the old comedian Charlie Drake coming in to perform magic tricks.  Bizarre.