An early Halloween horror scare in the season of food and comfort And the moral of the story is that you need never be alone in a crowd
THERE is something about the autumn months that puts a march in the step, a happiness in the heart and a pain in the back. The senescence of nature reflected in the changing colour of leaves and the more solemn air as winter sets in: darker evenings, smoke billowing from chimneys, vivid smells, winter ready bills, warms the cockles of the heart. It is, as if, everything comes back on track and life moves in a more natural rhythm. To me, above all, the darker evenings and colder days add up to food in all its tantalising guises.
Having been raised on tinned ravioli, ham sandwiches, Hot Cup soups and ready made sauces, I have evolved from my processed past into a fully flegded foodie, and at times, a wine expert to boot!
Peering into my freezer over the weekend, I realised I had turned into a squirrel. No less than 15 frozen steaks greeted me, along with a leg of lamb, several varieties of freezer bag protected fish, sausages, a slab of beef, ice cream, burgers, the end of an Aldi ‘Brunch’ ice cream The Whirlwind Princess had stuffed in there somehow, for safe keeping and numerous bags of frozen spinach and veg.
Now I’m not normally a horder, except for newspaper articles, set aside, but even here I’m more a well intentioned sloth.
As the freezer evidence attests, I clearly have been planning my winter meals all summer. I have my mother arriving in a few weeks, hence the roast meats to be thawed out, but the rest is just a bit excessive.
My food obsessions reached peak levels in Berlin, when unbeknownst to myself, my movements were, by and large, food related.
I was the first of the gang up every morning, even chancing a run, the morning after the first night out, and my destination was always one tracked down by my nose. Not being one for using Tripadvisor around every corner, as I try to avoid smartphones as much as possible on holiday, I rely on guide books for, erm, guidance and soon found myself eating apple streudel, followed by curry wurst (a hot dog with loads of ketchup and curry powder on top), followed by weiner schnitzel, and pancakes with hot berries on top.
I had listed - among my top three activities in Berlin - visiting a massive food emporium. This did not come to pass, but over the weekend, I must have sampled a dozen diffeent varieties of German food and except for the curry wurst, I can report that all were very good.
Back in my galley kitchen my spice rack features spices from across the world from sumac to Nigella seeds and I do use most of them. As winter draws in I anticipate many grand Sunday meals and lots of lazy afternoons, but while there is light, there is work.
And so Sunday was spent picking up the gold, bronze and burnt orange leaves from the front and back garden, assisted by some eager beaver young neighbours and The Whirlwind Princess and The Little Fella.
The work went slowly and as we finished in the fading light with the glow of a distant street lamp our only guide, a sense of great satisfaction washed over me, as I blotted out the rest of my duties (grass cutting, decking fixing upping and treating etc).
I had the spare room full of Halloween ghouls, skeletons and evil laughing pumpkins and then the fireworks went off as The Whirlind Princess declared that she was too scared to go into the house. Gah!
The Halloween fun will have to be more ‘safe’ and old fashioned, but what harm.
There will be treats and tricks and hot food. Oh yes, plenty of that! AND the dog turned on him, I swear to goodness. There was blood all over the tiles in the kitchen.
‘He carries the teeth marks on his shin to this day. And all because he changed to a new aftershave. Let that be a lesson to us all. Sure the poor mutt didn’t recognise his own master in the dark when yer man came home from the pub that night. Could have killed him. It was just as well the dog is only the size of your lad there. A taller one would have gone straight for the throat.’
Now I cannot vouch for the truth or otherwise of this tale, though it has since made me look at The Pooch and at my choice of toiletries with a fresh eye. In all honesty I do not want to know whether my informant was peddling fact or fiction, for the story was just too perfect to query.
‘You say the dog is the same size as my mine, present tense,’ I said to the gent with whom I had fallen into step no more than three minutes earlier.‘But, surely it must have been put down after such an episode?’
‘Not a bit of it!’ scoffed my informant. ‘Yer man just reverted to Old Spice, original formula, and the thing was sorted. Not a peep out of the oul mutt since. And a new security light has been installed at the back door over the kennel, which comes on whenever there’s any movement. The dog has no excuse now.’
It seems that I have inherited my late mother’s tendency to strike up unlikely conversations with folk I have not met before. The gent with the lurid tale of the rampaging jack russell had never before crossed my path until we chanced upon each other at the far end of the principal public park in Our Town.
The Pooch growled at him, so I apologised. Instead of growling back he took no offence and the chat took off amiably from there. By the time we went separate ways at the municipal tennis courts, he was on petting terms with my pet.
My mother was never one to walk a dog but as she grew older she regularly found herself providing a willing audience to perfect strangers. The queue in the bank was fertile ground for such fleeting acquaintanceships. She would arrive home with a new chequebook and improbable stories word of how the council was poisoning the water.
Another likely venue was the freezer section of the supermarket. A shared interest in potato waffles would flittingly blossom into discussion about varieties of rose bushes or the state of the euro-sterling exchange rate.
Over Sunday dinner, mother would tell her offspring how she had been talking to someone about how their children were either set to join NASA or, at the other end of the spectrum, were about to commence serving a life sentence in Mountjoy. Heaven only knows now who that someone was and heaven only knows what she told that someone about us.
She was likely to find herself chatting with whoever it was she stood next to on the street whenever a funeral cortege chanced to pass by. Or it might be the man who held the door open for her at the library. Or the young lad who helped her fill up at the petrol station. After spending much of her life wrapped up in reserved middle-class respectability, no one was more surprised that the woman herself at the onset of such promiscuous affability.
‘You must think I am mad,’ mother would say after revealing how she was running late because she had been learning about the perils of dental implants from some bloke with a bike. She was not mad at all, of course. Such brief encounters are often stimulating or enlightening. The remarkable aspect of her ability to make random contact with all those perfect strangers was that she lived in Dublin.
I was reminded the other day of the general reluctance of city dwellers to make eye contact when darling Hermione and I were strolling along the bank of the river which blows through our provincial town, cheerfully hailing anyone and everyone who was sharing the great outdoors with us, whether or not we knew who they were. But there was no gaining the attention of just one stony-faced couple sternly oblivious to our friendly overtures.
They were clearly metropolitans.