River without end

At least once a month I dream in rivers, dreams in which I am listening to the fish eagles calling  in the gorges above the Pungwe River of my childhood home in Zimbabwe or dreams of crossing the  broad brown sea of the Congo in an old steamer, engines grinding as we pass islands and mudbanks and swamps, watched by  sleepy crocodiles, crows, white egrets. In these dreams I am always alert for danger and waiting to see land, staring into the murky or turbulent floodwaters with both fear and exhilaration.

This morning a wind like ice is cutting through the mountains, gritty and dark with mist. More storms, more rain. My back garden is full of roosting speckled guineafowl, taunting my small dogs who dash back and forth barking up into the trees. The concrete-lined ditches and dug-out canals that line our village roads and lead into back yards and garden plots are gushing with pure mountain water from reservoirs high up  above the Elandskloof Pass.

I have been deadheading  orange and mauve and yellow daylilies in the front garden and ambling around looking at Cape Fold mountains at the far end of the valley, with clouds coming and going. I have on winter socks and a thick grey sweater in mid-summer. Away to the west there is the Hottentots-Holland range and to the north the Riviersondereind Range; the Breede River to the east and the Atlantic and Indian Oceas to the south. The mountain ranges are of Table Mountain sandstone and reach 1 590 metres or 5 217 feet in height, snow-covered in the winter, and spectacular because they rise with no foothills from the valley floor, craggy and imposing. Before the Dutch settlers Corporal Hieronymous Cruse and Ensign Oloff Bergh came in search of the River Without End in 1669, an indigenous people known as the Hessequas lived in thickly wooded forests teeming with game — on their journey, the two Dutch explorers estimated they saw more than 1 000 bonte hartbokken (antelope).

Now the forests of yellowwood, stinkwood, assegai, wild pear, alder are gone  — there are no longer giant fig trees in the Vyeboom (figtree) valley – the herds of buck, buffalo, zebra and the hippopotami are long gone and the Hessequas along with other Khoi and San peoples are extinct: they were enslaved or hunted down like wild animals. A terrible history. The old names  retain some memory of that once fertile paradise: Tygerhoek (leopard corner), Olifants Bosch (elephant bush), Bokke Rivier (buck river), Soete Melk Vallei (sweet milk valley). And right through the valleys where I live there flows the River Without End, the Riviersondereind, called after the Hessequa name Kanna-Kam-Kanna.

Meaning water everywhere, water without end, never-ending flow of living, moving water.

Rivers are very much part of my personal mythology because I grew up in a small landlocked country sandwiched between two great rivers, the Limpopo to the south and the Zambesi to the north. As a young girl I was taken on a camping trip to the Congo, crossing the delta of the second largest rainforest in the world, and later sailed along the Nile on a school trip. Years later, I realised that I had already encountered the Congo while  living near Lake Tanganika and crossing the Lualaba River which rushes down from the East African Rift Valley to become the Congo below Boyoma Falls. The cradle of humankind, the oldest known human habitation.

There have been other rivers of course, other memories: walking over a footbridge across the Thames  on a spring morning, the Avon flowing between water meadows, crossing the Severn into Wales,  having coffee beside the Seine. But those are another kind of river. The only river I have known that brings up in me the same tremulous sense of a strange brown god is the Mekong in Vietnam. The river described by the French- Indo-Chinese writer Marguerite Duras in The Lover:

‘My mother sometimes tells me that that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as big and beautiful and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean. In the surrounding flatness that stretches as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as fast as if the earth sloped downwards.’

Marguerite Duras: who came from a French outpost in Sa Dec  near the Mekong, who arrived in Paris so poor she would sell herself for a sack of rice. Who had earned the money to travel by whoring with a young Chinese merchant. She survives the Second World War,  she has a still-born child, she sees her husband come back from the concentration camp more dead than alive. She nurses him back to health and then has an affair with his best friend. She does not draw a sober breath in years but she creates a personal mythology that makes her a published author. She drinks. She begins to believe the myths written in her books. She  is able to live only in the past, back before the war, before the creation of  Marguerite Duras the tragic writer. She only lives as a child on the banks of the Mekong, staring into those brown waters of the great Asian delta,a hungry child scavenging on the Plain of Birds.  She becomes again her mother’s daughter, alone and poor and enraptured in the heart of Asia.

“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.”

Alcoholism is the driving force behind the most powerful and deluded mythologies a drinker can create. It shapes us in ways we cannot even begin to realise, holds us captive to a past that never was, a past of victimization or untouched potential or lost love. Irresistible until the day we stare into the destroyed present and know we have to begin again.

‘Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.’

So I stand in my garden looking out at the folded sandstone mountains all hazy with mist and I think about the dangers inherent in personal mythologies. And I remember that in the dreams in which I am crossing rivers, staring at brown expanses of river, I am drunk, unsure of my footing, uncertain of reaching dry land. And that always there is a storm in the water, turbulence, darkness, and strong tides dragging at me, pulling me underwater, that in these dreams I cannot seem to swim. It is a relief to wake sober in my own bed, to leave the rivers for another day.

Life unfolding

 

Sunday mornings are very good times to be sober. There I was, up at the crack of dawn, inventing a marinade for my small plucked and drawn quail that I intend to pan-roast with pancetta and  sliced porcini for  a light and elegant lunch. It will only be elegant until my guests have to fiddle with tiny quail bones. I served this dish once when my friend Alette was still alive and she sat tugging at thigh bones like matchsticks muttering ‘Hate it! Hate It! Hate it!‘ in an audible growl. But fiddly and impossible as they are, roasted quail taste delicious. I am going to stuff their minuscule cavities with snipped garlic chives and sage and butter. There will be steamed brown rice and a big bowl of salad to accompany the roast  quail and porcini mushrooms.  Out here in the mountains quail run wild along with francolin and guinea fowl, abundant and unendangered as a species.

Once my quail are prepared for the pot, I am going to curl up on my sofa and scribble away at my unpublishable novel which skips along merrily from picaresque to burlesque. My hero has had his name changed from Arturo to Tomas and is subsequently more lovable.  I see that Peter Ackroyd has written a new book, all about the English medieval writer Geoffrey Chaucer who penned the Canterbury Tales. We studied those at university and I can still quote rollicking sections from the tale told by the Wife of Bath. Ackroyd will be able to indulge his penchant for Catholic nostalgia and a robust green-hearted Olde England full of saucy pilgrims, winding white roads by the river and airy cathedrals, ‘the very flower of Catholicism’.

Life unfolding. Yesterday I went up into the mountains and didn’t see any eland, but stood for a long time watching a young kestrel on a telegraph pole. The clean grassy smell of the wind blowing across the mountains of the Overberg, the patchwork of harvested wheat fields far below.

 

Heidigger: “At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary.”

When the sun comes out

 

It is 9am and I have finished working in the garden while composing the next chapter of the Great Rushed Novel. My sweet busty heroine has fallen out of love before the hero has had a chance to consummate their passion. Just as I had found all kinds of epithets for the word ‘vagina’. My sex scenes are unintentionally very funny because I can’t write about sex in a deep meaningful way that is also mildly pornographic and  imaginatively arousing while avoiding hackneyed  cliches. I don’t think I can even have sex that way.

Never mind! About 90% of writers battle to write  the naughty bits. ‘Oh take off your big girl panties, Eleanor, do.‘ Here are some disgusting epithets for vagina from Kathleen Parker who wrote a [very bad] book called Save the Males: the vagina is an ”inner sanctum,” “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss of …” no, I can’t bring myself to write it.

Moving on. My garden is a source of abiding pleasure right now. There are masses of aromatic herbs in grey and silver and various shades of bluey-green  and  my small bay leaf tree  is covered with new light-green foliage. I love spending time out there with my little dogs running back and forth among the marigolds and bushes of rosemary and origanum. They smell like Mediterranean goats or lambs ready for the oven.

 

Another newly sober friend had a fight with her employer, stormed out of the office and  stopped  at the bottlestore on her way home for several cases of beer. She has called me twice, weeping and belching (well. beer is fiull of gaseous hops), and I am not going to waste my breath talking to her until she decides to sober up and try again. I found  when I sobered up that I had very few coping skills and almost any conflict, criticism or frown from a stranger would throw me off balance. I was reactive, insecure and had no tolerance for prolonged emotional discomfort. ‘Oh, put on your big girl panties, Eleanor, do!’

From the New York Times review of Mary Karr’s recovery memoir Lit:

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling.”

Ravaged

From The Lover by Marguerite Duras who died of complications arising from alcoholism in 2003:

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said:

“I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

 

Eland in the wild

Kept awake much of the night by a chorus of frogs under the bougainvillea outside my bedroom window, so my Nanowrimo novel is not really catching fire this morning. I have left my heroine in a stagecoach somewhere with her corset unlaced thinking post-modernist feminist thoughts about  why men accuse women of ‘withholding’ sex from them as if sex was a undeniable right rather than a consensual intimacy. Don DeLillo has a great riff somewhere on the word ‘entered’ when used in sex scenes, a term that is similarly inappropriate.

‘He entered her swiftly as if she was a hotel lobby.’

Nobody eats ratatouille any longer. My housemate came home and said, ‘How quaint! Are we having a retro-1970s menu? I shall get out my  old fondue set and we can put sliced green bell peppers into everything.‘ But it was a delicious if old-fashioned ratatouille and I have only 12 aubergines left to eat.

My friend Char who told me last week she had decided to settle down and be my neighbour here in the village for ever and ever, has sold her house on a whim and is moving to the Swartland, a wheat-growing area half-a-day’s drive from here. Many of us country people don’t flinch at driving six or seven hours to visit friends and family, but I feel abandoned and rejected and have invited her to supper on Saturday so that I can moan at her a little. I may give her some nostalgic ratatouille or a fiery Sichuan pepper aubergine dish.

Last night my housemate told me that she will help pay for a new raised herb bed for me as a Christmas gift. I am very grateful and  quite excited. I sat down after supper last night and sketched a potager design for the herb bed, putting in all kinds of unusual herbs like Vietnamese mint that turns the tip of your tongue numb. Chervil, borage, origanum, sage, parsley, thyme, basil, rosemary, dill, fennel, coriander, angelica, hyssop, marjoram, marigolds etc. And the oak and the ash and the bonny rowan tree. I shall have to scale down but right now my dreams are those of someone who has discovered a new continent. Well, less colonial and imperialist, but the same fire to create the ultimate culinary herb collection known to humankind.

This weekend, if the rain stops, I am going to climb half a mountain and look through binoculars at eland crossing the vlei. We have many wild buck in this region and eland are my favourites. They were sacred to the Khoisan people and there are rock art paintings of eland in prehistoric cave sites all across southern Africa.

How wonderful to be alive and sober.

A surfeit of smoky sultry aubergine

My housemate called to ask what I am making for supper.  She sounded tired, flustered and in urgent need of comfort food. I knew just the thing.

‘Moutabal!’ I said happily.

‘No,’ she said in a flat, no-nonsense voice. ‘I don’t know what moutabal is and I have no desire to know. I want a supper I can recognise.’

Moutabal is an Arabic dish of smoky oven-baked aubergine pulsed into a creamy dip with garlic, cumin, lemon juice and olive oil. Unfortunately it resembles curdled tofu,  but tastes silky and delicious and cuminy, the kind of exotic and erotic melange you might experience if you were to find yourself in a Middle Eastern bazaar embracing a camel.  I go into raptures from the first mouthful and sometimes spoon on Greek yoghurt or nutty dollops of tahini. Perfect with pitta bread or grilled lamb chops or served up in a mezze with hummous and spicy lamb kofte.

But perhaps not today, even though the vegetable drawer of my fridge is crammed full of blue-black glossy aubergines. I have eaten aubergines on and off for two weeks. They are cheap, ripe and  versatile. Who can resist the aubergine? But  when somebody says they want a recognisable supper dish, they mean they want cottage pie or spaghetti bolognaise or roast chicken with roast potatoes and peas.

So I shall make grilled lamb chops with mashed potatoes and ratatouille. The aubergine  play a leading role in the ratatouille but ratatouille is tasty,  recognisably Mediterranean and not too exotic. I always make quite a lot of ratatouille because it is just as tasty the next day and goes with anything.

Ratatouille

4  medium aubergines
3 red bell peppers (I hold these over a gas flame on a toasting fork and remove the blackened skins but that is optional)
1 kg ripe plum or beefeater tomatoes, blanched and the skins removed

3 skinny courgettes/zucchinis
4 cloves garlic
Herbes de Provence (a mix of fresh or dried rosemary, thyme, parsley, origanum)
olive oil
salt, freshly ground pepper and cayenne

Cut the aubergines into thick 2cm (1 inch) cubes and fry with some oil for 30 minutes, stir regularly. Most aubergines don’t need to be salted and drained to remove bitterness any longer, but use young aubergines

Cut the courgettes into large dice and fry in extra-virgin olive  oil, stir regularly.

Cut the tomatoes into smallish chunks and cook in casserole dish with olive oil, until the juice is reduced.

Fry the onions and garlic over gentle heat in extra-virgin olive oil.

Place all the vegetables without their juices into a casserole dish, pour in 5oz of extra-virgin olive oil and scatter the herbs over. Season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper and a hint of cayenne or sweet smoked paprika. Stir well and simmer for about 15 minutes.

 

The work of the world

 

The sun is already high over the mountains and I have been writing my heart out for hours. Pages and pages of handwritten storytelling in a moleskine notebook I bought as a birthday gift for a friend who does not keep diaries and wanted a ceramic butter dish instead. So I found a white and gold butter dish for her and I am writing in the moleskine notebook. Writing by hand can break through writer’s block because the hand keeps moving on the page and ideas flow more naturally down the arm to the hand and pen than onto a keyboard. I can’t bear to reread but that is another story.

 

My succulents need repotting. When it comes to succulents I am a codependent slut. I don’t believe they can look after themselves. I follow them around in their prickly leatheriness with a watering can, wanting to drown them with love. Succulents don’t need Little Miss Muffet with her watering can: they have fleshy, juicy leaves and stems that withstand drought in very harsh places. I have collected all kinds of succulents from the Karoo and the Kalahari, grouped in terracotta pots or glazed blue and green pots or tin cans with holes punched in the bottom with a hammer and nail. Southern Africa harbours more succulents than any other similar region in the world. We don’t have cacti (those spiky beasts  found in Arizona). But I have haworthias, gasterias, stapeliads, crassulas, euphorbias, cotyledons, lithops, aeoniums and dozens of indigenous aloes. My neighbours think my succulents are ugly as sin. They walk past my house and point to my pink and grey pigs’ ears  (Cotyledon orbiculata) and say,’Can you imagine putting that ugly thing in such a nice blue pot?‘ They grow roses, marguerite daisies and day lilies from nurseries that  sell pretty plants to people who don’t do succulents. When I hear my neighbours laughing at my grey and brown succulents, I want to run out and water them, drown them with my unnecessary love.

That Step 10 is at work in me, turning straw into gold. Some days I feel like this, from the wonderful American poet Marge Piercy:

To Be of Use

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real

The poetry is in the pity

 

Today is Remembrance Day or Veterans Day. I always think of red poppies growing on a battle field in Flanders because as a small child we wore  red poppies made of scarlet crepe paper and listened to Reveille. People still spoke of the Great War, the war to end all wars. There is a non-fiction book just out from Juliet Nicholson called The Great Silence 1918-1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War and I found this passage in Linda Christmas’ review very moving. The loved ones and families could not bury their dead, all those thousands and thousands of young dead men. We must not forget these things.

The book’s title refers not only to the introduction in 1919 of the two minutes’ silence we observe on November 11, but also to the period of mourning that engulfed this country at the end of the Great War.

The mourning was made more unbearable because there were no bodies to bury: the dead were abandoned where they fell, to be eaten by rats as big as otters. The horrific details were conveyed via survivors, poets and Abel Gance’s film J’accuse (1919), which is said to have caused women to faint at its portrayal of the futility of war.

It is also the day, 11 november 1965, on which Ian Smith declared the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that separated Rhodesia from the United Kingdom and set that white-dominated colony on the road to war, the small forgotten war in Africa in which my brother was killed. Not a happy day for me and I try not to chew over old memories. My brother would have been 52 if he had lived.

 

Anyway. Let’s hear some encouraging words on poetry from Dylan Thomas who was one of us but never got around to well, you know, sobering up. His favourite comment was ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do.’ On a literary trip to New York he died after reportedly consuming 18 whiskies in one sitting.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

 

And here is a poem by Keith Douglas who died as a young soldier in the Second World War, killed oin the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. The last lines always make me tearful: And death who had the soldier singled/ has done the lover mortal hurt.

Vergissmeinicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

For Jim, pouring whisky into milk

 

This is one of my favourite stories in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

When I first read it, I knew exactly what Jim had in mind. I remembered how I was very ill once  after drinking  a trifle too much  over the course of three days and nights. The empty vodka bottles were tucked away in my lingerie drawer for safekeeping. My throat was raw and burning, my stomach raw and cramping, I was shaking like a leaf. The only liquid I could get down my  raw and inflamed gullet was a glass of cold milk. I poured myself a a glass of milk and took a mouthful. Although I heaved and shuddered with nausea, it went down. It struck me that I probably needed something medicinal to help with the soothing milk. There in my lingerie drawer, tucked up with   my clean underwear, was a bottle of Polish vodka with some vodka  in it! Serendipity.  A very soothing and innocuous combination, vodka and cold milk. Only 14 years to go before I realised how crazy I was. And discovered that Jim had been there before me.

‘Our first example is a friend we shall call Jim. This man has a charming wife and family. He inherited a lucrative automobile agency. He had a commendable World War record. He is a good salesman. Everybody likes him. He is an intelligent man, normal so far as we can see, except for a nervous disposition. He did no drinking until he was thirty-five. In a few years he became so violent when intoxicated that he had to be committed. On leaving the asylum he came into contact with us.

We told him what we knew of alcoholism and the answer we had found. He made a beginning. His family was re- assembled, and he began to work as a salesman for the business he had lost through drinking. All went well for a time, but he failed to enlarge his spiritual life. To his consternation, he found himself drunk half a dozen times in rapid succession. On each of these occasions we worked with him, reviewing carefully what had happened. He agreed he was a real alcoholic and in a serious condition. He knew he faced another trip to the asylum if he kept on. Moreover, he would lose his family for whom he had a deep affection. Yet he got drunk again. we asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the brass, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive to the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich. I also had the notion that I might find a customer for a car at this place, which was familiar for I had been going to it for years. I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

“Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk. I vaguely sense I was not being any too smart, but I reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.”

Thus started one more journey to the asylum for Jim. Here was the threat of commitment, the loss of family and position, to say nothing of that intense mental and physical suffering which drinking always caused him. He had much knowledge about himself as an alcoholic. Yet all reasons for not drinking were easily pushed aside in favor of the foolish idea that he could take whiskey if only he mixed it with milk!’

A book for which trees will die

 

All night I have been dreaming about honey badgers in a deep green forest. In the dream they talk like Beatrix Potter characters and wear bonnets and aprons with big bows sprouting from their furry backs. I had years of dreams in which the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland would appear with a stopwatch and squeal, ‘Bless my sainted whiskers, I’m late again!’

I have written 400 words for Nanowrimo and have nothing much else to say because my novel-in-the-making is stuck. I shall try again later and if I am still stuck I will try again tomorrow morning. Here is an encouraging note from the Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah:

‘A lot more people just want to know how they can be “real” , and that word keeps coming up, how they can be “real” writers. It is to these aspiring writers that I now reveal the secret to writing success.

 

Write.

That’s it.

Just write.

A writer is a person who writes.

Talent is overrated. Luck is overrated. The right agent is overrated. It helps to have all three, but they are all worthless without that thing in your hand, the manuscript, the thing in your hand that may become a book for which trees will die and that will be published and primped and pampered and put on bookshelves and paid for by people.

And this is what is underrated: the sitting down and grinding it out part. Because that is what writing is. You, at your computer or with your notebook, writing, and writing, revising and writing, and revising again.’

 

Right now I am undergoing a foodie infatuation with aubergines. My housemate has a renewed  longing for Scotch eggs. We cook on opposite sides of the kitchen and distance from one another’s preferences. I cannot get enough of aubergines char-grilled with a garlicky tomato sauce and a touch of cumin. Or slices of aubergine char-grilled and anointed with olive oil and grated Parmesan. In Bangkok I once ate tiny  white aubergines like seed pearls, slightly bitter and perfect with Thai green curry. My housemate makes her Scotch eggs with lean mince and a soft-boiled egg packed into the obloid shape of mince and onion and finely chopped parsley, which is then baked in a hot oven. We smile at each other across the kitchen table like contestants on a Masterchef  show.

 

And in the early mornings and last thing at night I am reflecting on Step 10. With slight heartburn from all that garlicky aubergine.

‘Learning daily to spot, admit, and correct these flaws is the essence of character-building and good living.  An honest regret for harms done, a genuine gratitude for blessings received, and a willingness to try for better things tomorrow will be the permanent assets we shall seek.’