A Winter’s Tale

I’m no great fan of winter, but given that many of my nearest and dearest have spent much of the past month sheltering from a ravaging sun and baking degree temperatures, I’m determined to make the most of the pleasant things about the northern-hemisphere January chill. First and foremost are potter-y weekends.

Mostly I’m thankful for having a warm and dry place to live. The Beloved’s previous English abode, in which I visited him, was only occasionally warm and never really dry. The cold seeped in through a hundred drafts and crevices too small to be seen but big enough to be felt. The cold radiated in from the single-glazed windows and crept up through the floor. When in action, the radiators would glow with a welcome heat. Cold feet were pressed against them and clothes horses full of wet washing would bask in front of them. The already-damp air grew damper and the house had developed a slight but definite smell of mould, which clung to everything in it. Arriving most of the way around the world to return to me, the Beloved’s clothes brought with them the scent of the house. Thirty-one hours after leaving his little damp flat, the faint air of mould and still followed him in.

Now, however, while the winter drizzles or rages or chills outside, we are snug in our warm new flat, thanking relevant deities and cosmic forces for double-glazing and the storage heating that wraps us in a gentle warmth at all times.

Without our sorely missed web of family and friends to claim our time, we find ourselves with long, luxurious hours to spend at home. Our old weekend rituals have been replaced by new ones. In the absence of a newspaper delivery or an early-opening newsagent, we no longer do Saturday morning breakfast with Saturday morning newspapers and the Saturday crossword. Also gone are long brunches with friends, as breakfast isn’t a social event here, and places to eat it are sparse anyway. Instead, we make our own pancakes, and I’m about to experiment with homemade crumpets.

Instead, we spend companionable afternoons doing our own thing together; the Beloved kills dragons with his laptop and I potter in the kitchen, turning out loaves of bread that fill the house with a divine smell. These we nibble away at, eating fat slabs and with a smear of salty butter.

A new ritual is a big pot of Sunday soup. Some bacon, garlic, lentils and whatever of the vegie box bounty we have yet to consume go into the big red pot. In go a few parsnips and carrots, scrubbed of the coating of dirt in which they arrive. In go leeks and pumpkin, swede and turnip, and at the end the inevitable kale or cabbage. The Beloved’s dislike of said vegetable is untempered by my attempts to disguise it with garlic or cream, but he will tolerate it in a thick splodge of vegie soup. The whole lot simmers gently on the stove until something hearty and warm and yet cleansing and tasty is ready to be ladelled into bowls.

Another ritual is a long walk in the crisp afternoon. Sometimes, this takes me into the rich, historic neighbourhood nearby. This is populated with red-brick mansions with big gardens and BMWs and a tennis club. I like to walk around the crescents, peer over the walls and imagine what the enormous houses are like inside. My constant companion is Radio 4, which chats to me about jazz greats or ponders restaurants in Vietnam or performs an afternoon play. Wrapped up against the cold, I pad around the streets warm, and when the sunset glows above the old houses I scuttle gratefully back into the cosiness, my face glowing from the cold air.

The toughest bit of winter, for those of us lucky enough to be warmly housed and well equipped, is that it goes on for so long. By the time the season officially started on the winter solstice in late December, we had already had weeks of snow, and winter felt well and truly here. A month and a half later, it seems incredible that we’re only halfway through.

As the winter chugs by, a few things keep me going. Firstly, signs that the day is lengthening; a sunny day that seems to begin earlier; the faintest hint of blue that remains in the sky as I drive home. Another sign of hope are the first shoots of the spring bulbs that are poking through the ground, particularly in the grass verges by the roadsides. Furled in their pale green tips are what will be daffodils and snowdrops. We await hopefully the first signs of change in the vegie box that will hint at the changing season. I’m eagerly awaiting the spring greens, dreaming of new things to do once the root vegies and leeks give way to asparagus. The Beloved, however, just can’t wait to see the last of the cabbage.

Great British Phrases

I have written here and here before about my ongoing fascination with English English, that being the language spoken in England, with quirks peculiar to the British Isles. I have continued to gather new English phrases and terms, and my latest clutch of novel expressions relate to work and organising one’s life around it.

When one arrives at work in Britain the first thing to do is make tea. On our floor some of the teams have a rotating tea monitor who is sent to the kitchen for a batch of steaming beverages; many of my colleagues are never without a hot drink. Our employer provides both standard instant coffee and a decaffeinated variety which seems to me rather pointless: if not for the caffeine, why would you drink the stuff? In my view, such over-processed rubbish is aptly described by one of my favourite new phrases: ne use ne ornament, which indicates that it is neither useful nor beautiful. Perhaps for some people it is instead fit for purpose, a succinct way to indicate that something does what it says on the box, which is incidentally another Great British phrase, although less likely to be used by politicians or the media to describe military equipment or an English hospital.

Also on offer in our work kitchen is ‘normal’ tea, again the bulk mass produced stuff. Here, this is described as builder’s tea, which I find odd. Why are builders associated with tea drinking? I understand why it’s not search and rescue pilot’s tea or race-car driver’s tea, but why builder’s tea and not palaeontologist’s tea or insurance salesman’s tea?

Once the work day has commenced, my colleagues have a handy selection of phrases to use when work is frustrating. A futile task is like nailing jelly to a wall, which I find highly amusing. I have developed my own variations: like pinning toothpaste to a radiator and like taping soup to a clock. These however make less sense than another useful British simile: like walking through porridge, which could only have been coined in Britain. Doubtless they have equivalents elsewhere; walking through congee or walking through borsch would effectively convey the required sentiment.

Another raft of British phrases can be used to organise one’s social life outside of work. Early doors describes going out early on a weeknight in order to be home for bed at the usual time. This explains the peculiarly British practice of meeting for dinner at 5.30 or 6pm, which strangely works quite well in British conditions, much like Christmas. By 5.30 in midwinter it’s been dark for more than an hour and it feels high time to be sitting by a fire with a hearty meal on the way.

Other phrases that intrigue me relate to holidays and the end of the work day. I love the fact that in Britain (or at least in the Midlands) the end of the work day is referred to as the close of play, as though the office were a schoolyard in which a game of rounders was to be curtailed by the 3.30pm bell. If after the close of play one is disappearing for a holiday, departing the office is described as breaking up. So if I finish work for the Christmas holidays on 16 September, I would be described as breaking up on 16 September, as well as taking more holidays than I am owed. Although I’ve head of a group breaking up at the end of a term, for example, when the phrase is applied to an individual and their workplace it has curious connotations, as though one was severing an intimate connection with one’s place of work. Logically, returning after a vacation would then be ‘getting back together with’ work, but I’ve not heard that used. Perhaps describing it in that way would necessitate the use of my final and favourite new phrase. In the words of my colleague, it would make you look like a right pilchard. I don’t know what pilchards look like, but I’m fairly sure resembling one is not a good thing for a human.

Barcelona and the Barcelonans

In Barcelona, they know how to live. A weekend away in that most joyous of cities brought home to me just how many things the Spanish get right that the British get wrong (and north America and Australia are guilty of many of the same sins, to various degrees). It seems to me that in Barcelona they have their priorities right. Without being useless hedonists, they value the things that make life better: family, food and surroundings to cheer the soul.

For a start, their city is beautiful. Sure, there are tower-block dormitory suburbs, but for the main, Barcelona is a combination of wide, graceful boulevards lined with beautiful art nouveau apartment buildings and narrow, atmospheric lanes full of quirky shops. In contrast, so many buildings in Britain seem to be small-windowed and utilitarian, the same unexciting house designs repeated beside one another again and again to fill a street.

In Barcelona, the weather is warm enough to keep spirits up and they have enough daylight to be cheerful about. Acclimatised as we are to British winter, we discarded our coats while the Barcelonans wandered about in puffy jackets and scarves. Britain’s weather is nobody’s fault but everybody’s burden.

The Spanish know how to apportion their time; the siesta hours are traditionally set aside for a long lunch. Sunday is reserved for family, for eating, for rest, and reserved for everyone, not just those who don’t work in the retail or service sectors, who in the Anglo world are expected to work on Sundays (except in Perth. You rock, Perth). If that wasn’t enough, the shopping in Barcelona is superb: the lovely lanes and boulevards are stuffed with shops selling decent quality, stylish, good value clothes and shoes.

The Catalans also place a high value on eating well, a fact evident in the standard of fare served everywhere we went. The abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, the astonishingly good meat and dairy and bread all made it clear what Barcelona’s residents want and expect to eat. The absence of fast food outlets and the lack of junk food on sale suggests that the Spanish don’t have the British taste for over-processed, over-salted, over-greased food (or worse, artificially flavoured low-fat food).

In Britain there is a middle-class movement toward good food that is taking hold, but the Spanish are there already, and always have been. In criticising Britain, I don’t mean to suggest that there is no good food here. Indeed, regular visitors will have read me wax lyrical about some good things in Britain, and the growing movement toward food that is real and decent rather than processed and crap. The thing is you need to know where to find this; where to go for a proper home-made cake, a pub meal that’s not mass produced by a chain, a decent sandwich that isn’t on plastic white-slice bread. On the contrary, in Spain, it’s everywhere. We didn’t look at a single restaurant review (which are treacherously subjective at the best of times) and did no research whatsoever about where to eat. Instead, we wandered into whatever eatery we liked the look of when we got hungry. And we ate like kings.

In Barcelona they have real bread, not over-processed rubbish. Everywhere. The bread is made in the abundant bakeries where they also serve real coffee and excellent pastries. You can wander out on a Sunday morning and read the paper over a fine breakfast without having to think hard about where to find it, consult four friends and drive across town. Wine and beer are cheap, abundant and excellent. You can walk into a tapas bar and graze until full on slabs of tortilla, tender squid, balls of meat and rice, garlicky mushrooms and a host of other things, all for the price of a Big Mac.

Granted, there are some things that Britain does well: heritage, countryside, tea, the media, queuing. It has less of the crippling bureaucracy that makes life in Mediterranean countries so tiring. But in the Mediterranean they really know how to live. They’ve got it sorted.

A Parsnip in a Pear Tree

I have recently come out in a rash of Christmas carols, and have been humming, singing and listening to festive songs for weeks. This commenced at 7am on the first of December when the cheerful folk at the gym played carols at us and I puffed away to a boppy version of All I Want For Christmas is You. Since then I have been turning up Classic FM whenever carols come on while I’m driving, much to the irritation of the Beloved, who likes most species of classical music with the exception of the choral.

However when the Twelve Days of Christmas started to play inside my cranium, I kept getting the lyrics wrong. This sent me to the font of all possibly spurious knowledge, the web, to find out the real words. On the way, I found out all manner of possibly bogus but generally entertaining variations on this ditty about a doubtless slightly confused bird stuck up a fruit tree. Most of it I gleaned from Wikipedia, so its credibility is open to question.

In this way I learned that although the Twelve Days of Christmas seems to be about a series of increasingly impractical Christmas gifts, the song in fact concerns the twelve days after Christmas. These days conclude on the now redundant early English festival Twelfth Night, which gave Shakespeare’s play its title. The song itself might have begun as a something akin to an early modern drinking game played on this day, although those making mistakes forfeited a sweet or a kiss rather than a drink. According to the very proper-sounding 1780 book Mirth without Mischief, the game concluded with mince pies and ‘twelfth cake’.

More mischevious is an old French version of the song that survives in the west of that country. This runs through a list of Christmas dishes, from a ‘good stuffing without bones’ through ‘four pigs’ trotters’ to ‘ten full casks’. It concludes with ‘eleven beautiful full-breasted maidens’, which are apparently also a Christmas delicacy, and twelve musketeers with their – ahem – swords.

Other countries have their own versions, more and less recent. Scotland has a nineteenth-century version with fewer breasts and more stalks of corn, and which also includes an Arabian baboon, which wasn’t a Scottish delicacy last time I checked. There are various Australian versions, too, which are too cheesy to be repeated; suffice to say the gifts are replaced with animals native to said country, including an emu up a gum tree. A Canadian version includes four pounds of back bacon, three French toast and two turtlenecks; a Maori edition is entitled ‘A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree’.

The award for the most macabre variation on the Twelve Days of Christmas goes to the version which begins ‘On the first day of Christmas…a body…dead…wrapped in plastic’. This was recorded by the cast of Twin Peaks in 1990. The version sung by the Muppets is less creepy, as is that by a Las Vegas entertainer, in which she consumed, while singing, a different alcoholic drink for each day. Entitled ‘The Twelve Daze of Christmas’, the song became less coherent as she progressed.

Perhaps the most amusing variation on this theme is the Christmas Price Index, a spoof economic measure. The Index uses the items mentioned by the song as its ‘market basket’ of goods whose prices it checks each year. The prices are compared with previous years as a measure of inflation. To gather their data, the economists examine local prices of each item. The price of a pear tree is taken from a local Philadelphia nursery and the value of partridge, turtle dove and French hens from the Cincinnati Zoo. The milking maids are assumed to be unskilled labourers on the US national minimum wage; the cost of leaping lords is provided by the Philadelphia Ballet; and the cost of drummers drumming comes from a local musicians’ union. Apparently the dancers’ wages make them the most expensive on the list, followed by swans, whose unpredictable breeding cycle makes them difficult to source with certainty. Last year, the total bill for all 364 items (each item is re-sent each day, as you recall) came to just under $20,000. That’s one expensive set of Christmas presents.

So, in a testimony to all this hilarity, here is my own personal version of the song, based on culinary delights at Christmas.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,my true love sent to me
Twelve puddings plummy,
Eleven brandy butters,
Ten hams a-leaping,
Nine pumpkins dancing,
Eight chocolates milky,
Seven swans a-roasting,
Six cheese a-waiting,
Fine gravy,
Four enormous birds,
Three French sticks,
Two rubber gloves,
And a parsnip in a pear tree.

Merry Christmas!

A Beginner’s Guide to Snow

The snow arrived without warning. One minute the sky looked ominous and the next we seemed to be in the middle of a snow cone, with snowflakes flying in every direction. I amused my colleagues by racing to the window to watch, entranced, as the snow flitted down – and across, and around, and up and down. While the rest of the day alternated disconcertingly frequently between sunshine and heavy snow, the weekend brought more consistent falls. For an antipodean whose experience of snow is a limited experience of skiing, this necessitated a crash course in how to navigate said phenomenon.

I have learnt to spot clouds that bring snow rather than rain. They have a dark, heavy quality that is quite unlike rainclouds, although I’m unable to describe exactly what makes them distinctive. The Beloved provided helpful tips on how to walk safely on a thin layer of snow: stick to that unsullied by footprints and avoid that which has been compacted by other feet and then frozen into ice. I have learnt that squirting water onto your windscreen as you drive only adds a layer of ice to the miasma of ice that is already obscuring your vision. I have also learnt that when it’s really cold your water tanks freeze, so it doesn’t work anyway. To clear a windscreen obscured by ice, I have learnt that valiantly attacking the ice on your windscreen with a scraper will elicit pity from the postman, who may oblige by giving you a can of de-icer spray.

My expertise in snow handling was greatly enhanced by a weekend spent in Durham, which being far north of us was draped in a thick covering of snow. By the time we left the whole city was snug under a snowy blanket of about ten centimetres.

In Durham, I had my first experience of driving in snow. I drove to the city on the motorway which like all main roads is diligently covered in salt and grit by the authorities when snow is forecast, and which was therefore damp rather than snowy or icy. It wasn’t until I arrived at our B&B on the outskirts of Durham that I found a road covered in snow. I had no idea how to drive on snow or indeed whether it was possible, so I rolled gingerly onto the icy white carpet and found it made little difference.

Durham was a picture. The snow settled on gravestones and outlined the bare branches of trees. People wore a track through the snow to the extraordinary eleventh-century cathedral, which is a shrine to St Cuthbert, patron saint of custard. Possibly. I went inside in eager anticipation of a carol service, imagining the ethereal sound of the choir echoing around the huge interior. Instead, I found a Caribbean-style steel-drum band was playing La Bamba and a group of children with disabilities were preparing to present a Nativity play. I passed.

Then it started to snow again. It’s hard to know what to write about snow because all of the clichés are true. Snowflakes really are impossibly elegant and soft and do waft gently sideways and upwards and round about as well as downwards. I haven’t noticed the particular silence that the snow brings, but I have found that because it makes no noise, when you’re indoors it can snow away merrily for hours before you notice it. Amongst my other lessons regarding this meteorological phenomenon, I’ve learnt to tell when it is snowing, which is helpful when the Beloved claims it’s raining. Fortunately, being out when it’s snowing is somehow more forgiving than being out in cold rain, perhaps because it doesn’t pelt down and wet your clothes instantly. Snow will hang around on your clothes a bit, not melting for a while, so that you can duck inside and brush it off before you’re drenched.

In the morning, we awoke to find our car buried under nearly ten centimetres of snow. This was a new project. The Beloved, who for some reason had no gloves, did full justice to our friend’s new simile ‘whinging like an Australian in the snow’. My response was somewhat different; the very winter wonderland-y appearance of our surroundings made me want to frolic, which I did with some relish. The Beloved started hacking at the snow with the scraper, and eventually the last layer of ice was sprayed merrily with de-icer. Finally, we set off, somewhat hampered by the lack of windscreen wipers, which were still frozen solid, as was the water for the windscreen. We had to rely on snow melting off the bonnet and spraying up onto the glass. A new experience all round.

Tights and Budgets

Ballet, I’m told, is a set of highly unnatural activities that are both painful to perform and bad for you in the long term. Not that ballet has ever threatened my health; although I did take lessons for a few years as a child, I was awful at it. Not that I had much of a clue of this, apart from noticing that it was never me chosen to play the butterfly while most of the class played the wind in our end of year concert. I was however highly envious of friends who went to ‘proper’ ballet schools where they did end of year productions in which they had tutus and proper costumes that weren’t bits of fabric attached to their usual leotards. I particularly remember a production of the Nutcracker where a dear friend was the tiniest and daintiest of Sugar Plum Fairies, in a little plum-coloured costume.

So it was with such fond childhood memories in mind that I went to see a professional production of the Nutcracker. In some ways, this turned out to have much in common with the provincial ballet school production that featured my friend. It was entertaining in a most unexpected fashion.

Our Nutcracker was notable for two things: tights and budgets. From the beginning it was evident that this was a cheerfully low-budget production. The various locations were indicated by one of two glittery, slightly garish backdrops. The dancers’ costumes, all cotton and tulle with stick-on glitter, had evidently been either made for hire or to accommodate a range of wearers of different sizes, and in many cases were pinned in at the back to make them fit.

The dancers, too, were all freshly minted graduates, rather than expensive stars. Not that this mattered; I’m about as able to tell an average dancer from a superb dancer as I am able to tell one croquet champion from another. The dancers’ newness was however evident in some ways, all of them endearing. Their acting was definitely from the gasp, hand-to-forehead, look-around-in-disbelief-or-anguish school of pantomime stagecraft. In a similar way, while it’s well known that dancers fix their gaze on an unmoving point, say a wall, to anchor them during pirouettes, these girls hung onto the wall with their eyes as though their life depended on it. Perhaps it did. Strangely, this touch of reality was endearing, as though we were seeing through the cracks into the hard work behind what they were making look so effortless.

Apart from the tight budgets, the notable feature of this production was the tights. I realised that it was a while since I’d been to the ballet when I was surprised to find that male dancers still dance in nothing but tights and shoes on their bottom halves. One of my companions admitted to being guiltily transfixed by muscular buttocks and we all tried not to rudely stare at other bulges that are normally more subtly concealed. But being in the second row, we all spent time gazing awestruck at the extraordinary leg musculature of all the dancers, which was gently outlined by their white tights. The calves and thighs as they balanced and lifted and leaned and jumped; the arms outstretched and gracefully waved, the constant, effortless execution of things too taxing for ordinary mortals.

But my favourite part, given that the costumes were not much of a spectacle, was watching the women’s feet. The graceful curve of their arches; the entire weight of a human body balanced carefully on a small wad of something enclosed in a shiny satin shoe. I found myself wondering if the dancers wash the beautiful creamy shoes that emerged onto the stage so pristine and were gradually scuffed and blackened until they were spotted and grubby.

But despite all this entertainment, I was wistful for my tiny, delicate Sugar Plum fairy. Instead of my friend there was an obviously accomplished dancer whose smart pirouettes marked her out from the rest. But she was a solid, muscular athlete with a wide, almost grimacing smile plastered permanently across her face. One of the other dancers who had a more birdlike build reminded me of my friend, who is no longer ten years old but is still slight and breakable-looking. Perhaps it is because she lives on the other side of the world from me now and I miss her, but I wished it was her on stage, my tiny, birdlike friend, dancing with a ten-year-old’s careful, deliberate movements in her little plum tutu.

Crisp and Christmassy

I knew winter had arrived when I had to stop and scrape more ice from my windscreen one morning earlier in the week. I had already scraped off what I mistakenly thought was sufficient viewing space, but had in fact not removed enough of the crust of ice that encased my car. It was eerie (and cold) being enclosed in a frosted ice parcel, driving through the quiet streets at 7am in pitch darkness.

I already had a fair idea that winter had arrived when I noticed it has started to get dark by 4.15 in the afternoon, and that the sunrises from the windows in the gym were getting later and later. The best method of dealing with this, in my view, is to count the days until they begin to get longer again (nineteen days, and counting). After that, we get back an extra three minutes a day of daylight.

The funny thing about such darkness is that it doesn’t yet feel grim. Partly because it’s not been soggy and grey, but rather crisp and icy, or – even better – just clear and mild. But the main thing that keeps it from feeling grim is Christmas. Wonderful as a warm Australian Christmas is, and as much as I like seafood for Christmas lunch and long, warm summer days to celebrate in, Christmas doesn’t quite work as well in the Antipodes. At this time of year in Australia, there’s just too much on already to enjoy Christmas, Australians are already frantically dealing with the end of the school year, the wrapping up of sports groups and hobbies for the summer, and the general rush to finalise everything before Christmas, which magically inserts itself into the calendar as a date by which everything needs to be done. Here, there’s just not much else happening. The Christmas and New Year week is a welcome but brief respite from normal life, so there is less of a rush for loose ends to be tied up before everyone disappears for the summer break.

In the same way, Christmas food – rich cakes and puddings, hearty hot roast meats and root vegetables – doesn’t quite work when it’s somewhere between twenty five and forty degrees, and when there are lots of luscious summer foods that are more tempting in hot weather. In contrast, in Britain, the whole celebration feels right. It’s the perfect weather for roasting an enormous fowl and a tray of vegetables, and potatoes and parsnips, carrots and pumpkin are all in season. Here, it’s the time of year where there are slim pickings of fresh fruit and a boozy dried-fruit pudding that’s wallowing in custard seems incredibly inviting. The holly is indeed covered in berries, and there could conceivably be snowflakes. Christmas lights, too, make much more sense when it’s dark for longer than it’s light, and they come on before the shops close.

What’s more, it not only feels right, it feels necessary. Rather than being weighed down by the dark and the cold, the city is festive. There’s a sense of anticipation. People are taking annual leave to go Christmas shopping and the grimness of winter is dispelled by mulled wine and ice-skating and Christmas markets. This week my choir rehearsed carols and it was lovely to sing about Good King Wenceslas’ footprints in the snow when it was chilly outside. ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine’ is somehow more resonant when it’s the weather for eating heartily. It really felt like Christmas was on it’s way, and not in a how-will-I-get-everything-done-in-time way; in fact, it’s more ‘yes, a mince pie would be delightful, and why not a mulled wine too’.

Darth Vader and the Nativity

I’d never been to Yorkshire until a delightful wedding took me up north last weekend. The verdict: damp, quaint and yet contemporary.

Yorkshire still wore the last vestiges of autumn colour, the bright leaves lingering in sheltered spots. The grim leaflessness of winter was still being kept at bay by the unseasonal mildness that we’ve been enjoying since the end of summer. It was however very damp. It rained on the journey. It rained when we arrived for the ceremony. It rained as we went to the pub, and the bride’s white satin shoes were splashed, although her lovely fifties hemline floated well above the ground. It probably rained during the reception, although we didn’t notice.

Yorkshire however seemed to be organised for coping with rain. The morning after the wedding we stopped to pootle (NB English terminology) around the village, and stopped in at the local craft market. This was held indoors, in a designated market building, a very sensible strategy given the weather. Said market was surprisingly free of lavender and lace, and well endowed with talented makers of decent sculpture, well-crafted jewellery and edgy knitting. It also sold Christmas cards featuring a Nativity scene populated with Star Wars characters (Darth Vader as a shepherd), and so-called sculptures made from aluminium foil. We also liked the large sculpture shaped like a sea mine that was made from rusted iron and hovered at the perfect height for most people to bump their heads on.

This pleasantly contemporary artisannness was a contrast to our B&B, which was in a stone terrace on a country lane. The B&B was decorated with a mix of eighties Nordic pine and country kitsch, and featured a life-sized plastic dog and a stuffed stag’s head. Our room was pink. We had an enormous four-poster bed decked out in pink floral polyester with pink frills around the top. There were floral curtains in, yes, pink, and a bathroom in keeping with the remainder of the decor. On the couch was a polyester rug printed with tartan overlaid with teddy bears, and a real polyester teddy bear sat on top clutching a red polyester heart cushion. The mantelpiece proudly displayed a fine collection of miniature tea sets, with thimble-sized cups and saucers in a range of pastel colours. The Beloved, perhaps overwhelmed by all the pinkness, promptly fired up Sky Sports News on the television, and the little room had an injection of testosterone.

Outside, things were again on the quaint side, along wow-this-still-exists lines. The black-faced sheep were fenced in by dry stone walls. I followed a public footpath through them, and each time the path hit a wall there was a stone stile that somehow allowed humans to climb over but excluded sheep. At other points there were little twisty gaps that allowed homo sapiens legs to shimmy through but excluded any short, fluffy ovine equivalents.

Local food in this part of Yorkshire was hearty and delicious. We had lunch in the pub under the bare old low-slung beams and were bemused to discover sandwiches that were served with the usual side serving not of crisps, the British obsession, nor a salad or garnish nor even a sprig of parsley. Sandwiches here were instead served with a side of nachos. That’s it, come to Yorkshire and taste our, um, nachos. More traditional were the Yorkshire puddings, and the hot roast meat, gravy and stuffing that was served sandwiched not by slices of bread or even a bread roll, but something called a savoury teacake. Intrigued, we insisted one of our party order this and were somewhat disappointed that said teacake turned out to be the local name for what is called a cob in the Midlands, a bap in other parts and a bread roll in Australia. With an intimate and delightful wedding to occupy the remainder of our time, it was a delightful first visit to what is known here as The North.

Antipodean Accents

Until recently, I’d not given much thought to how Australians were perceived by the rest of the world. I always assumed that other countries perceived us as we were, or as I see us: multicultural, tolerant, open, down-to-earth; a young and upbeat nation. Sure, like all countries we have our redneck element, but I assumed that we had successfully broadcast to the world a picture of contemporary Australian society as it really is. Not so.

Perhaps the first thing that really brought home to me the persistent stereotypes about Australia was an item on a British comedy show that reviewed news items from the previous week in a humorous way. One of the items presented was a quote from Lily Allen, made at one of her concerts in Australia. Allen commented on a racist attack that had just occurred in Britain and said that she hoped most Australians weren’t bigoted rednecks, as in England. The audience laughed uproariously – what ignorance!

This growing awareness of the stereotypes about Australia has made me hyper aware of my accent. I’ve written here before about how when I first arrived in Britain my accent had its corners rounded and its edges smoothed as I unconsciously attempted not to broadcast my foreignness with every word I uttered. Although my accent isn’t overly strong anyway, especially as I’m surrounded with British tones all day, I am even more conscious of the messages my Australian accent sends to the people I speak to.

Accents are really important in Britain and are intimately connected to the class system; before you’ve finished your first sentence to a new acquaintance you have inadvertently communicated something about the region and financial circumstances in which you were raised. My Scottish friend, for example, to whom I commented on her lack of Scottish lilt, noted blithely that she was a ‘posh Scot,’ the implication being that only middling and lower class Scots have a strong accent. From what I can gather, there are broad stereotypes attached to each type of accent. Northern England is the land of grim poverty and closed mines, low incomes and low education; the Midlands is halfway there; Ireland, too is provincial. This isn’t to argue that people labour constantly under the weight of repressive stereotypes, or that such things aren’t breaking down. But the undertones are there.

This growing awareness of the influence of accents has also made me hear my own Antipodean pronunciation in a new light, particularly when it’s spoken by other people and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 amongst all the nicely correct Home Counties accents. This week, the BBC presented an item on the Australian Prime Minister’s apology to people that had been shipped to Australia when they were poor English children. There was also an item on how Australia’s relationship with China was being strained by the emerging world power’s bullying over a film about a Chinese dissident, and also over a failed business deal. As part of these news items, several learned analysts presented learned analyses of the situation. And sounded like hicks. In even, measured tones, both interviewees offered sentences that sounded, to my newly-sensitised ear, like they were Alf from the Australian sitcom ‘Home and Away’ saying Flamin’ Galah, or Strewth, Ails! in his extremely broad accent. Something about the breadth of their vowels and the flatness of their tone said loudly to me ‘colonial!’ and ‘provincial!’

In fact, ‘Home and Away’ has a lot to do with the fact that Australia is perceived extremely positively by Brits. Very often, when people ask me exactly where I’m from, they ask why I would leave Australia to come to Britain. Why leave such sunshine? A land of perpetual summer? Such open space? Such a relaxed lifestyle? Such a constant stream of cliff-hanger finales, overblown drama and bad acting? (Well, perhaps not the last one). Often they then tell me about a friend or relative that has emigrated, and how they might consider it as well. Some of these people have never even visited Australia. So perhaps my accent suggests other things to them as well.

Kale and Hearty

Last year in the UK, autumn was roundly defeated by winter, which arrived early and triumphant with a blast of snowy weather to demonstrate its victory over autumn. This kind of thing caused me some dismay last time I lived in England, when I realised that although winter doesn’t actually start until 21 December, the Kingdom will have been covered by a blanket of winter for several months by then. And that’s just the beginning of it.

Not so this year. Autumn has been glorious, and has floated languidly on and on into November. It’s been sunny. Yes, sunny – England! We’ve had gentle sunshine over and over again. We’ve not had autumn storms or torrential rains or grim cloud. Just peaceful sunshine. And with the lack of storms, the autumn colour has been spectacular. Combined with an unseasonal mildness that has let us stave off taking out winter coats until this week, it has been lovely.

The main thing I like about the change of seaons is the new fruit and vegetables that arrive with the cooler weather. Especially in autumn, when pumpkin is back, with crisp apples, tasty pears and in Britain, a preponderance of blackberries. For us, this has been brought home by a new subscription to a vegetable box scheme. Every week, a gentleman arrives in a delivery van while we’re not home, and hides a box of vegetables in a cupboard by our front door. When we get home it’s like Santa has delivered a box of goodies, particularly as we don’t know in advance what will be in there.

The box’s contents are decided by the farm, according to what’s in season. This means that we get all sorts of things that are less common in Australia, and that I don’t quite know what to do with. Last week the Beloved was disconcerted by some spinach that refused to wilt in the pan, and brought the lot upstairs to check with me whether he’d misidentified a vegetable. He had, and we both learnt that something that looks like a cross between silver beet and cabbage is in fact called kale. The Beloved is still not convinced it deserves a spot on our dinner table, even when slathered in garlic (a sure-fire way to endear him to most things). The box was also how we learnt what Sharon fruit is, although that’s not a great addition to my life.

Another good thing about the box is that the produce is mostly straight off the farm. The carrots are still encrusted with dirt, and everything looks like it’s been home grown. It’s fantastic to have a fridge full of burstingly fresh stuff ready to be transformed into something tasty for dinner, and I really like the creative challenge of cooking with the random assortment of vegetables that happen to be in my fridge. And that there’s almost always a long, slow-cooked vegetable soup waiting to happen each weekend. It could have bacon and lentils, or white beans, a parmesan rind, rosemary and thyme, or some lamb bones and chick peas.

So this evening I’m looking forward to getting home and discovering what Santa’s left us this week. Based on recent weeks, it’s likely to include carrots, leeks, the aforementioned kale and other cabbagey things, a mountain of potatoes, some broccoli and a cauliflower and some bananas (the latter not grown in our region, of course). As to the rest, we know only that it will be autumnal and gorgeous.