Breakfast at Christopher's

Despite the fact that I have twenty or so cookery books with such diverse titles as "Italian Cooking", "Cooking the French Way", "Grandma's Little Recipe Book", "The Woman's Institute Book of Recipes", Delia Smith's How to Cook , Part Two", "The Malawian CookBook", "1000 Recipes", "Miracle Foods" and even "Winnie the Pooh's Cook Book", I hate cooking. To spend hours skinning and peeling , chopping and mincing, flavouring, savouring, basting, tasting, dicing and slicing and spicing ; all for an end product that will be swallowed in less than ten minutes, seems a pretty pointless occupation.

I try to follow the recipe books faithfully; but I always discover that one - apparantly indispensable - ingredient is not in my pantry; and I have absolutely no aptitude for discovering a satisfactory substitute. My pastry refuses to form a ball and I add water until it becomes a grey approximation to the ooze that, as a paddling child, I used to find near the sewage pipe on Bridlington sands. No longer how long I beat, my egg whites remain nebulously clear and my arms sore with the exercise. My frying oil is either too much or too little-and always too hot, with grey acrid fumes rising from the pan. Worse still, my sausages are black on one side and lucidly uncooked on the other.

I hate frozen food because it always seems to need frying (see the problem of frying in the previous paragraph) or boil in a bag which seems rather akin to making a cup of tea rather than a hearty meal. In any case, it seems to me that all frozen food, when heated becomes instantly tasteless. I do not use a microwave: I can neither understand the instructions nor eradicate my instinct that if food can really be prepared so quickly, someone might have discovered that fact centuries ago and putting the kibosh on the careers of Mrs Beeton and Delia and the countless other young, fashionable chefs that appear endlessly on TV.

I am not absolutely useless. I can make a hearty soup and don't mind doing so: I bung all the necessary ingredients into a big saucepan and leave the kitchen for an hour or so. On my return, I tip the slush into a food blender and, voila! a thick country soup. And I have discovered how to make an Apple Sponge.

So, all I need is the course in between.

Well, on Sunday, I roasted beef. It sort of worked, but the real test came yesterday, when I had to clean the oven which was dark brown -nay, black- with burnt crusted fat.

There never was a clearer reason for becoming a vegetarian.

Yoschi de la Planete

Although I love Einstein dearly - he is such a tatterdemalion! -and there have been other dogs in my life: Molly, the Red Setter (s0meone once said of the breed, "100% heart and 0% brain), Smirnoff, who travelled from Switzerland to Essex to Central Africa, and Portia, a cross breed Spaniel; the one which runs most boisterously through my dreams is Yoschi

The name in English is translated as Little Joseph. His real name was much grander as befitted a pedigree: Yoshi de la Planete.

He was a gift from my students, one long ago November. The idea that a dog would be the perfect birthday present came from Charlie Bethell who in those days was a cheerful tow-haired boy with a grin from ear to ear. He told members of staff of his idea, all of whom advised him against such a move. He was undaunted. He went to see the headmaster. That wise man looked at him steadily for a moment; then said, "Well, if you are really determined, you had better make sure that it is a very good dog."

And so Yoschi was. I was inveigled into the Grand'Salle, the central area of the school, to be greeted by cheers and singing and Charlie moving forward towards me.I looked down into his arms.There lay the tiny tan form of a boxer puppy. He gazed up at me with melting dark eyes, quite unfazed by the hubub around him.

But nothing ever fazed Yoschi. The school was his world. Each morning, when I went off to wake up the senior boys in the boarding house. I would let him out into the park. I never saw him for the next three hours. He made his tour of his school. First - and this, I am sure, was because he was Swiss and understood etiquette - he would pop into the head's office to say "Bonjour"; then, (persumably because he was not simply Swiss but Suisse Romande and therefore aware of French manners), he would go to the secretariat and greet the ladies there whom, he knew, really appreciated his charm. Then, the overture over, he would trot round to the kitchens where the chef would serve him breakfast. By now, of course, the school was in lessons, and he would check out the grounds before returning to the central courtyard with its red squirrels, its fountain and the tree where the post used to be given out to the students. My classroom was there with its great tall french windows. He would find it, see me teaching, leap though the open window and curl up for a doze beneath my desk. When he got bored with the lesson, he would get to his feet, stretch with an enormous yawn, move to the door, open it and leave. The students recognised a braver spirit than theirs in his comment.

We went to Gstaad in Winter, and I remember his delight of the snow. He would spy a laden meadow and leap into it, disappearing below the white surface. Then he would suddenly appear out of the snow in an arc of joy, barking, before submerging, only to reappear in another gigantic leap a hundred yards away.

He was not without intelligence. He knew who everyone was in the school and where they stood in the heirarchy. He had only to watch an event once and he knew what to do. That is how he learned how to deal with doors.

But there was one mystery I never solved.

It was during his first days in Gstaad. For the first time I took him down the little path that led to the main street and along to the station hotel which we entered and took the lift up to the apartment of a friend on the top floor. There were students from school there and when it came time for them to return to school, my friend asked me if I would stay for supper with her. Since I was free , I accepted and asked one of the students to take Yoschi back to the room I had in one of the school chalets and feed him before going down to the main building for supper. The boy departed with Yoschi. I know that the two of them went down to the ground floor in the hotel lift. I know that they travelled by car from the station to the school.

So, how was Yoschi able to be barking outside the apartment door of my friend half an hour later, determined not to miss out on my evening? How did he follow a route he had only taken once? And how did he get from the ground floor of the hotel to the fifth floor where my friend had her apartment? I have visions of him standing up on his back paws and pushing the lift buttons; or, perhaps he made sympathetic contact with a fellow guest: he would have instinctively known with which stranger he shoud bond.

I only saw him discomfitted once. I had been shopping and , after putting away most of my purchases, left to go down to the main building of the school to do some work. When I returned, I opened the door to find Yoschi, vainly trying to sink into the back of the settee as if he could be invisible. His face, his paws, the settee and the room were covered in flour - far more than could ever have been in the original packet, it seemed. Yoschi had on his face a look of complete amazement and tried, without success, to give me a look that pleaded innocence.

He never did it again.

He was a dog of life and love, who knew his place (the very middle of my bed) and understood people. He loved the school and the school loved him.

He had a massive heart attack and died in Gstaad.
I wept.

Einstein

Einstein is an important element of my life. He is seven months old and a true Yorkshire Terrier: stalwart, determined, independent . We have just come back from a long walk through the rimed and sparkling lanes and fields.
On these walks, it is he who decides the itinerary: usually a leisurely beginning, for it is important to sniff every doorstep, every lamp post, every cobbled corner. Then, as we set off along the upper road that leads from the cite along the ridge, the pace begins to quicken. Between the Junior School and the Fire Station, there is a wide grass verge where the houses are set back from the road, and several lime trees stand in an orderly French manner, precisely shaped into regular squares above the bare trunk. Here, some days, time is spent examining each one; however, today, there is only a cursory consideration, and he pulls onwards towards the next goal. This is a pile of grit and shingle that stands beside blocks of black and grey marble. These, belong to the funeral parlour across the road which is conveniently placed; the town cemetary is round the next corner.
Before we get there, though - and we are now beyond the town's boundaries - we have to pass a few cottages where two fox terriers live. The first time we made this walk, when he was just three months old, they hurled themselves at the wooden palings, barking . This startled Einstein who cowered and trembled. Of course, now he is seven months old, he is no longer afraid; but I notice that he always changes the side of me on which he walks at this point, preferring to examine the gutter rather than the fence.
We reach le Croix des Landes which is a cafe/shop at a point where several roads join. The one by which we have approached leads straight on to La Ferte Mace; but, on the right, is a road that comes up from the more modern part of town and a lane that leads to the dechetterie (rubbish dump, I suppose, in English; but really that translation is hardly suitable for such an efficient and hygeinic utility which speaks volumes for the difference between civic efficiency in France and in the UK). We will follow that lane later, but for the present, Einstein wants to go off to the left, along the lane that leads between fields full of rough haired bullocks and grazing cows and one or two beautiful if isolated cottages to a slightly higher road from which we can see the valley of a small tributary of the Varenne and, beyond, the beginning of the rolling hills and grazing, wooded dales of what is known as Suisse Normandie.
He is alert and curious, quite content to be on a long lead and pausing every now and then to glance back and reassure himself that I am there and alright. Sometimes he bounds ahead to a patch of grass -quite undistinguishable to any other patch of grass as far as I can tell - which absorbs him.
The air is crisp, but the sun gives a liveliness to the whole scene. For both of us, the walk has breathed a sense of total contentment.
Once we return home, he promptly curls up and falls into a doze. However, he has an ear cocked for when I go into the kitchen to the biscuit tin.

A Start

I don't know how this is going to work out, but here goes.

This is a beautiful landscape - and very French. This morning is frosty and crisply shining. Vivaldi is playing on the CD and I look out across the glowingly wooded country which, when I woke this morning was clothed in grey. The woods floated darkly on the sea of mist like galleons at anchor. If this is retirement, then I am all for it.

I have bought a house in a small mediaeval town that stands on a precipitous thrust of rock. There is a ruined Norman castle first built by William the Conqueror and later used by Henry II and his remarkable wife Aelinor of Aquitaine.Below it is a ravine carved out by a river which does not look powerful enough to have achieved such a chasm.

Behind the castle, the here are two or three cobbled streets and squares which trickle down towards the modern town. They are lined with timber and stone houses from various centuries.On the southern side of the ridge there are the remains of the old ramparts, lichen covered and to these walls the houses cling.Mine was built in the early seventeenth century with heavy square stone. It is not on the street but hides behind an even older house which certainly looks mediaeval with bulging small-paned windows and a tiny front door. Next to it is a white door which one assumes at first is a garage; but when it is opened it leads, on the right, to the back door of the street house and, on the left, the front door of a house which is now empty. Straight ahead, a pair of rather rickety, wooden doors lead to a narrow passage that passes my front door and comes to the yard and the back door which is situated in an extension that runs as far as the city wall at the end of the yard.