Snapshot: Our last New Year’s Eve with Jim
The occasion is New Year’s Eve, the place is my son Jim’s flat in Germany.
We are drinking a toast to the coming year – 2005 – and hoping that it will be a better year than 2004 because Jim has just been released from hospital after seven months’ intensive treatment for leukaemia, including a bone-marrow transplant.
We are hoping that he will be cured, but sadly this was not to be and this would be our last New Year’s Eve together and our last family photo all together. However, looking at this picture never fails to make us smile, because Jim left us with a special memory of that evening. At midnight we all went on to the balcony of the flat to watch the fireworks over the city.
We managed to lock ourselves out and it was freezing. We were two floors up and couldn’t imagine how we would escape without getting hypothermia.
Jim came to the rescue – he made a rope from shoelaces, using a slip knot he remembered from Scouts and managed to lasso the window catch, click it and let us in.
When we look at this photo we remember Jim, and all the happy family occasions we shared.
Lynda Das
Playlist: Soundtrack to my American love-in
River by Joni Mitchell
“Oh, I wish I had a river / I could skate away on / But it don’t snow here …”
In April 1974, I fell in love three times: with America, on my first visit; second, with Marcy B, a young woman who seemed to tick all the boxes; third, with my American-Jewish extended family whom I had never met. Leaving Boston on a Greyhound bus, headed for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I made the connection: I’d seen it all before, on TV or in the cinema. The landscape unfolded like a huge movie screen, and seemed to welcome me in.
I was off to stay with friends who had emigrated from Bristol. Marcy, my friend Susan’s sister, was invited for the weekend. It wasn’t love at first sight – possibly the third or fourth, but not more. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the album of the moment, was the soundtrack to my stay. Marcy and I parted with unspoken messages hanging in the air, but a determination to continue.
Next I went to see my father’s cousin, Anne, in Connecticut. She and her husband, Manny, welcomed me with a Saturday brunch to which she invited 70 people at least – many of them relations I was meeting for the first time. They were all warm, welcoming and funny. Everyone pumped my hand, kissed me, intrigued to meet “our cousin David, the PhD from England” as Anne insisted on introducing me.
Relatives arrived from Florida, one from California. I was thrilled to meet my cousin George and discover someone with an identical sense of humour to my own. Here, too, Blue played on the hi-fi constantly as I forged new family bonds and enjoyed such wonderful hospitality.
Marcy and I did meet again later. We got together, stayed together for a time, parted badly, stranding me in New York City. Then I wished I had a river I could skate away on …
David Milner
We love to eat: Granny’s original lentil soup
Ingredients
1 onion
2 large carrots
1 potato
½ small turnip
200g red lentils
1.5l vegetable stock
Finely chop the onion, dice the carrots, potato and turnip and add to your finest soup pot. Add stock and bring to the boil. Reduce heat, add lentils, cover and simmer for at least an hour and a half, adding more stock if necessary. Season to taste.
There are few things more comforting in life than a bowl of Granny’s homemade soup. As well as endless games of draughts, hunt the thimble and Andy Stewart sing-a-longs, a visit to my granny’s always involved generous helpings of home-cooking, copious amounts of contraband (Ringos, Breakaways, Top Deck shandy) expertly hidden in Tupperware containers and, more often than not, a big bowl of homemade soup. Everyone thinks their granny made the best soup, but my granny really did.
She was my mammie’s mammie, a big, cuddly, couthy granny and her cooking was hearty and simple. Largely housebound due to polio as a child, she wasn’t hindered in the kitchen – or scullery as she called it. She was always hovering over the stove conjuring up rice puddings, girdle scones, pancakes and her speciality – an annual boiling of jam, made from the finest Perthshire raspberries (handpicked by us grandbairns), cooked in a giant “jeely pan” and strained through what looked suspiciously like an old pair of tights.
She died when I was 17. It wasn’t the right time for me. That sounds awful but it was around the time I discovered cider and girls and I had kind of forgotten about her for a wee while. My love of her and her soup never diminished, though. As with snowflakes, no two grannies’ lentil soup recipes are the same. Any time I had lentil soup, it was never the same. Even my mum – no slouch in the soup department – could never quite emulate Ma Thain’s secret elixir.
I’m an actor and years later, touring a schools panto one cold, wintry Glasgow afternoon, I warmed myself up between shows with a cup of lentil soup from a modest takeaway. I took a sip, and it was exactly like the soup my granny made. I hadn’t tasted that in 20 years. It was a profound moment and conjured all sorts of memories. Even more profound was the fact the cafe was called Evelyn’s – my mum’s name. I have since learned to make my own lentil soup and keep it simple, just like my granny used to, and I happily live off it for days. To paraphrase the medieval philosopher Maimonides: “Give a drama student a tin of soup; he’ll eat for a day. Teach him to make soup, he’ll eat for a few weeks then go back to buying tins again.”
My granny never lived to see me act professionally (mercifully, some would say) but I suspect she would have been very pleased to find that some of her culinary skills have rubbed off on her grandson. In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan says if we eat like our great-grandmas we’ll be all right. So, here’s to grannies – and their soup.
Andy Clark
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