Scotland Burns

Burns Night is Friday, 25 January.  Burns Night is to Scotland what Thanksgiving is to Canada and the USA.

I just bought my "fresh" haggis from the butcher.  I've made my own haggis in the past (using my grandmother's recipe - a German variant).  But with several hours of prep time though, it's much easier to have the butcher make it.  Before the Scots announced their drive for independence, it was easier to find haggis in the grocery stores.  This year (2013), it seems to be invisible.

Haggis will be the dinner's main course.  In more traditional homes, the haggis is addressed with a poem.  You could say that the address is similar to the prayer before the Thanksgiving meal.  But, it's more like an irreverent Passover ma nishtana, the "four questions" reciting the story of Passover.

Haggis is a meat dish that folks tell me requires a special palate.  I find its taste similar to Lebanese kibbeh or maybe a Turkish köfte.  That description probably doesn't help you, does it?  With its mixture of meats and grains, it has a nutty, savory taste.  If you don't know what's in it or what it is in, it's easy to eat.  If you know, well ... raise the mental blockades ... it can be like eating a pet dog or pet cat served in its own gut.

My partner, D, dreads this night of all nights.  Haggis, he says, is a ruminant regurgitated to be chewed again, which isn't entirely untrue.  And, offal, he says, is simply mis-spelled.  He refused to eat it last year, so this year he'll be served pseudo-haggis, a lean beef mince mixed with pre-cooked pin-head oats, cooked in a mini-tajine.

I also doubt he'll not take either the Balvenie or the cullen skink .  A moderately aged Balvenie, from NE Scotland's Speyside coast, is comparable to a well aged Kentucky bourbon. Sacrilege that it is, we may break open the King's Ginger instead.  The King's Ginger is English.  It represents everything Scotland remembers and both loves and hates: Empire.  It's a liqueur with the bite of fresh ginger and the pucker of a tart lemon.

And, cullen skink?  "Skink" is the Scots word for "shank".  Cullen skink is a light, creamy soup made from smoked haddock and potato.  I make my own skink using a French bisque method that liquefies the fish and potatoes.  So rich; it is a heart-attack in a soup cup!  Takes forever as well, but it can't be bought outside the 3-star Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, in Oxfordshire, where it requires a Monarch's ransom.  Le Manoir, in any case, doesn't do "takeaway".

For desert last year, we had cranachan -- a kind of pudding with raspberries and whisky.  D. refused that too.  I think he starved, actually.  I'm thinking of going with clootie this year -- a kind of brownie with baked-in fruits, served with whipped cream and, yes, more whisky.  I'll have shortbread ready, as a back-up.

Here, in advance, is to Scotland.  Scotland, you gave my country so much -- mostly Kentucky and Tennessee.

   

   

Oh, wasn't the snow just lovely!

Oh, wasn't the snow just lovely!
The snow that fell heavily throughout the weekend, here in the UK, was lovely indeed.  But, several days on, the British response to snow is evident almost everywhere.  It is not nearly as lovely.  The snow is no longer lovely, nor is it still snow.  It is ice, several inches thick.
  
The British don't do snow removal from sidewalks, paths, and minor roads.  People tread over it where it falls.  Layer is compacted upon layer until it becomes an ice-sheet, a glacier.  As sidewalks and paths become iced over, pedestrians and cyclist travel farther afield, into verges and finally into fields.  Eventually, the fields and parks become large sheets of ice.  A dog walk or simple stroll to the corner market becomes a danger to well being for the most able bodied, the young.  The old disappear from public life over-night, preferring to remain locked-in rather than to fall.
  
The British distraction from the snow removal is nurtured by several factors. 

• Time, of course.
  Remote jobs consume time.  And, the slower commute necessitated by walking or cycling through snow or over ice consumes more time.
     
• Snow shovels, or the wont of a good shovel, found another.
  Snow shovels sold in the local stores, even the local hardware store, are thin plastic.  They are good for snow removal only before the snow has been packed. And, they're expensive.  Health-care is pre-paid.  The cost of a snow-shovel digs into one's cash reserve.
     
• European environmental attitudes are yet another factor.
  In the case of snow and ice that means the spreading of salt.  It isn't natural.  The British prefer not to employ it.
  Instead, they use grit or sand.  But, they employ it before rather than after the storm.  In advance of an advancing storm, gritting trucks are in service late into night .  As amazing as gritting before snowfall is the way in which they grit.  North American gritting/salting trucks use mechanisms that allow grit and salt to be spread as the truck travels.  Not here, not on the minor roadways and paths anyway.  Here, a gritting truck is parked every so many feet, the driver gets out, grabs a shovel, and throws grit from the truck's bed.  It seems oddly inefficient and incongruent from the country that gave the world Grand-Theft-Auto, the game.  But, isn't it quaint!
     
• Ownership is yet another factor.
  Streets and sidewalks are the property of the Highways Agency -- in Cambridgeshire, administered by the county government.
  In years past, whether in the common mind or in the opinion of the Agency, it was commonly held that cleaning a sidewalk conferred a degree of 'ownership' or, at least, responsibility for the cleaned portion to the cleaner.  If you slipped and fell on an uncleaned sidewalk or roadway, liability was shared between the Highways Agency and the pedestrian.  If, however, you slipped and fell on ice remaining on a cleaned sidewalk or roadway, liability fell to the cleaner and the pedestrian.
  That opinion was reversed by Government last winter.  Any cleaning of sidewalks and roadways, Government held, was a public service that reduced accidents.  Unfortunately, reversal has had only modest effect to date [the winter of 2012/2013].

Interestingly, in my experience, streets with cleaned sidewalks are most likely populated by immigrants.  I don't know why that should be so.  My Spanish and North African neighbours rarely saw snow in their home country.  Many of my French and Italian neighbours, likewise, are from the Mediterranean coast where snow is as rare as it is in Florida.  It is possible that immigrants come from countries with a different sense of civic responsibility.  It is also quite likely that immigrants have more time on their hands.  At the moment, I certainly do have more time than work.
   
Whatever the case may be, the ingenuity of those cleaning sidewalks is plainly evident.  My Spanish neighbours use straw-bristle brushes and brooms.  When they clean the sidewalk in front of their houses, it looks as though they've fielded a curling (i.e., ice-shuffleboard) team.  The local French hotelier attempts to clean his steps with a flat floor mop.  It functions better with dust than with snow and ice.  But, the hotelier's tenacity suggests that the French are not "surrender monkeys" as the Simpson's groundskeeper Willie slurred.  My Italian neighbour uses a sheet of thick plastic wedged against his abdomen as he pushes forward.  It becomes springy against the resistance of the ice -- a force which he uses to jettison the snow and ice built up on the plastic sheet into the road.  This year, I've abandoned my own impromptu tools -- large kitchen serving implements -- for a dedicated snow shovel.  It's actually a coal shovel.  It's sturdy; the neighbourhood's ice-breaker.
    
Today, as I made my way into the city centre, I was thinking that I should have driven my ice-breaker in front of me.  Walking was hell on ice.
   
   

Dragons. Oysters. Pearls. Swine.

Max thought that the world was ending. 

7:30 a.m.   Yellow lights, prying at the wooden Ventian blinds guarding the windows.  Almighty hisses and unearthly growls threatening the front door. It could only a dragon.

The truth was almost as fantastical.

♠ 

But first, the scene needs be set with the boring bit.   ♥ We live on a narrow, Industrial age street.  The distance between street and door is less than one pace (@ 2.5 ft).   ♥ Our home is a converted church school.  The windows are high; so high, the neighbour children play handball against it with a soccer ball.  There's no proper peeking (peeping, in the British vernacular) through those windows.   ♥ A storm water drain resides where street and sidewalk meet outside our door.  Max has developed the habit of lifting his leg over it. What's a castle without a moat?

♠

So, when we opened the door to see this dragon, our view was filled fully by this.  A bilge truck.  One black tube fed a stream of pressurized water into the naked drain.  Another tube, larger, equipped with what appeared to be a kind of Archimedes' screw supped up the content of the drain: decaying leaves, cigarette butts and packaging, candy wrappers, train tickets and receipts, used tissues, and God-knows-what-else. 

A huge modern, yellow oyster on wheels.  It was simply a marvel.