Hor d'oeuvre of dry roasted biro

The other night a friend and I demolished a small roast of beef, getting into training for Christmas.

An unexpected addition to the menu was dry roasted biro.

For one dread moment I wondered whether I was the woman who mistook her pen for an aubergine.

But in a flash I solved the mystery. (Applause for Madame Sherlock.) A stray pen could easily be swept up in a tea-towel doubling as oven mitt and deposited in the oven along with a dish of vegetables, couldn't it? So it was served as an hors d'oeuvre with a soupçon of Dijon mustard and a garnish of Moore Wilson semi-dried tomatoes.

Modestly I claim the biro was a success. Tough and dry, I'll grant you that. But an impressive indigo colour and an acerbic literary flavour made it a fine culinary innovation. Recommended.

Wedding song

Wedding song

So you are the hunter

and I am the gatherer

and you are the gardener

and I am the traveller

and I am the dancer

and you are the dance.

And I am the dreamer

and you are the harbour

and you are the future

and I am the farmer

and you are the juggler

and I am the clown.

I see you—I know you—

I love you—I see—

that you are the builder

and I am the weaver

and you are the mover

and I am the mender

and you are the mountain,

and I am the cloud.

And you are the lover

and I am the lover

and we are a twosome

and you are the one.

by Rachel McAlpine, 1996

I originally wrote this wedding poem for friends.
Later I realised that it also fitted another bride and groom: my daughter and her husband.
Eventually the truth dawned: the concepts in this wedding song may make good sense to almost any two people in love and about to marry.

You may share Wedding Song freely, but please include my name as writer.

Fingertip information on glass: here now, enjoy.

Will people in their 70s and 80s live to see a world where intuitive glass displays replace computer screens? Of course. It's here already—just not in my home, yet.


Sure, it's an advertisement, for which I apologise. I have no connection with Corning's Glass. But their videos are a mind-goggling glimpse of the near future.

Isn't life great, with such adventures just around the corner?

View all the Day Made of Glass videos.

72 is the new 30—I beg your pardon?

Salon.com poses the burning question:

"Is 72 the new 30?"

No wonder we get confused about who we are and how to live.

Today (Saturday) I walked in the Wellington Botanic Gardens with my daughter and grandson.

Tomorrow I get on a plane for the Frankfurt Book Fair and a week in Berlin.

These are the words I will take with me, by the immortal Margaret Mahy.

Dance, dance, little old feet!
Spin on your ha'penny of time.
Roar, little old lion
in your meadow of cobwebs and rust
'Til you burn with the fiery power
of the dance and the rhyme
and fall back to the earth
in a sprinkle of golden dust.

Hear Margaret Mahy read the whole poem and others:
The Word Witch: with CD. Photo by Rossi

Forgiving Anne Perry and going to Heaven

Last year I posted some thoughts about the 1954 Hulme-Parker murder and the way it affected me. Some inflammatory comments resulted—because even 58 years later, that teen-age murder still polarises and alarms and infuriates people.

Why? What made me keep carping about Anne Perry's perseverative lying—at least in the privacy of my own mind? For example, claiming that she was an accessory to a murder when she was convicted of murder—planning it, fully participating, doing the deed, holding the brick. Is that my business, really? I was also perseverating and it wasn't healthy.

I had finally managed to forgive myself, I think, for failing to notice a murder was about to happen, failing to prevent the disaster developing under my very nose. (Ludicrous guilt, but that's guilt for you.)

But I still had to find a way of forgiving Anne Perry—in order to get her out of my head. Judging from the comments on my former post, so do some other people.

Yes! Success! A couple of videos combined to flick that rusty old FORGIVE switch in my brain and (touch wood) I have let it go.

• Interiors, a documentary about Anne Perry by Dana Linkiewicz shows her at home in a Scottish village.
• Ian Rankin's interview with Anne Perry for his TV series Evil Thoughts gets her to talk about her crime.

In both videos she continues to distort the truth and present the crime as an unfortunate event that just happened by accident, in her periphery, more or less. She is the heroine of her own story: fair enough—aren't we all?

OK, I don't have to believe her highly polished version of events. That's where I draw the line.

Because finally I get it. Anne Perry may be a famous Victorian crime writer but she is not leading the life of Riley. From the outside, it looks like an isolated, sad and struggling life. Perhaps she is still not free.

When I was about eight years old, I had an existential crisis: desperately worried about going to Hell, I consulted a professional—our Dad, then a small town vicar. At bedtime he gave me his considered (and possibly unorthodox) opinion.

1. He was pretty sure there was no such thing as Hell after death.
2. If there was an after-death Hell, only very very bad people would be sent there, and certainly not a little girl who had scribbled in a library book.
3. When pressed hard to define a "very very bad" person, he thought deeply and replied, "Perhaps a murderer who never felt sorry for their crime."

Whereupon I sighed with relief and slept soundly for the first time in, well, hours. 

Anne Perry will go to Heaven: Mormons do. She has doubtless arranged for her victim to go to Heaven too. Perhaps Heaven really will be the magical Fourth World she and Pauline imagined as girls. (Hope not. Eternal harps—enough. Eternal Mario Lanza—spare me.)

Of course she has to lie to herself! What's behind the mask is not my business.

Let us forgive this woman who is doing the best she can, like all of us. And pity her.


 

1970s vintage grannies dress up to dance

What to wear for the grannies' dance in the next Crows Feet Dance Collective show?

Six of the dancers are grandmothers and we are rehearsing an emotional dance to the song You are so beautiful.

We have to find our own costumes, vaguely 1970s vintage (like us), vaguely homogeneous (not like us), and totally liberating for dancing. That means not too heavy, not too tight, not too revealing, and able to accommodate kicks and deep knee bends.

Sally's lovely long dress in blues and greens is a foundation garment (joke) that has established a theme.

Yesterday I hunted through a few second hand shops. Rather than buy a dress on spec and crossing my fingers that it would blend with the others, I tried on the contenders and snapped them with my trusty iPhone.

Verdict: green dress from Polly's in Elizabeth Street is go. Everyone agrees.

I took some ghastly photos, but found that raising a leg improved my appearance considerably.

But I must also describe the weird experience of trying on a genuine 1970s Laura Ashley dress. High neck, big sleeves, dainty blue flowery Liberty print cotton fabric, waist, voluminous skirt.

I saw in the mirror an alien creature from a parallel universe—a sweet lady who never swears but runs through fields of daisies with tendrils of curly blond hair wafting behind in the wind. Butterflies flutter around my head. Bluebirds tweet. Three handsome princes are rivals for my hand.

Note that I am all blurry in this photo—you see me through a Vaselined lens, like Doris Day. I am probably going to die young, I'm just so pretty and quaint.

The Laura Ashley dress was yukky. I experienced a strong urge to vomit.

In the 1970s we were flat out doing wild stuff—fighting in the women's movement, recklessly travelling the world—wearing hippie gear, not aprons.

We did not dedicate our days to picking flowers and polishing the silver. We were reinventing ourselves.

And not as little Bo-Peep.

What were they thinking? In retrospect, the Laura Ashley craze looks like a patriarchal plot to lure us back into the kitchen.

Come to our new show: Sea of love: Songs of the 60s and 70s