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Lemons, Amalfi

Having had a very lemony dinner, it reminded me of the lemons I met in Amalfi last year. These were being sold in one of the local green grocers. Amalfitan lemons are too big to hold comfortably in the hand but the feel of their knarled skins sends sparks of rapture through your body. Limone oose the twangiest, most sublime elixir of all the citrus fruits. It is said that the origin of the word lemon derives from the Sanskrit, nimbuka and came into European languages via Persian, limu. Terraces of lemon trees reach up to the heavens all around Amalfi. Walking the streets and climbing the salità, the salty coastal breezes are royal carriages for the seraphic scent of the lemon trees, their leaves, bark and fruit. Breathe in and golden light permeates every pore in your body; breathe out and you smile. Fruits of ecstacy and pleausre.

The air smelt different this morning, and it buzzed. I am excited for Spring. This was late Spring in Roman Ostia last year.

As blue skies struggle against the greyest, dampest of weather, I fondly think back to seasonal festivities in late December. Last year I celebrated Yalda, the Persian (and Zoroastrian) festival of the Winter Solstice. An early, thickly fogged morning travelling to Stonehenge with Sheherazad, Tom and Doug was rewarded with one of the most atmospheric experiences of my life. The fog ensured we wouldn’t see the sun rise over the horizon but instead we were treated to walking among the clouds, rubbing shoulders with the giants that are the bluestones and sarsens. You can get a taste of what it was like by looking at our Stonehenge Winter Solstice photos. The new sun did emerge from the clouds fleetingly and I was content to say hello before it went off to show itself to others. In the evening, we celebrated Yalda with the Southampton Persian Society at Yalda Persian Restaurant. Scents of saffron, fluffy, buttery rice, flat breads pleasingly blistered in the cloam oven sprinkled with toasted caraway and sesame seeds, aromatic lamb and hot mint tea permeated all around as we divined the poems of Hafiz, ate, drank and laughed.

You can read my Zoroastrian celebration of Yalda article if you like?

Orange tree, Rome

Tom took this photo when he came to visit me when I was staying at the British School at Rome last year. The BSR have orange and lemon trees in their courtyard garden (cortile). They were beautiful, but some of the fruit were quite vile. Click on my flickr badge (mosaicing on the right hand side) to see other photos.

Today, the British government lauched its new (well it had to be ‘new’ didn’t it?) ‘Respect agenda’. I can here it now, “about time too,” “bloody yobs, something needs to be done” etc., etc. But what does it all mean? Many of us have suffered the stupid behaviour of other people, perhaps having to live near junkies or loud and self-absorbed students, or be verbally abused by gob-shite kids on our way home from work, or just having to walk down your own street or town centre seeing it strewn with rubbish, broken glass and over-flowing bins, for example. I can’t help thinking that this is yet another pathetic and shallow attempt by our government to tick another box on their contrite list of ‘things to do for Britain’.

Now they may go home happy that they’ve done something about it, none of them having to live around the few idiots that cause the many to have a more and more diminished quality of life. And there are many of the latter who just don’t care about these things and tend to retreat further and further in their own shells, living in bubbles where they don’t see the point of doing anything about our less than satisfactory social situation. They fratonise with their own, remain unobservant and uncaring of the community, environment or universe in which they live. They go from relationship to relationship, pay-rise to pay-rise, large house to larger house until one day, they decide they’re old and now the world owes them. So who’s being anti-social?

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Yesterday, I bought an amazing bed of tangerine quartz. Today, I have been trying to find out what causes the fabulous tangerine-orange hue. The colouring is translucent and comes from the surfaces of the quartz, rather than from the inclusion of a foreign mineral within. Tom (my extremely excellent other half) asked about what causes the similar but man-made effects displayed by aqua, ruby and opal aura quartz and Dave Watts (a mineral dealer) and Ian Williams (a physicist) explained that the effects are created by a process called Thin-film Deposition, also referred to as the ‘plasma treatment’ where (explained simply by me) clear quartz is placed in a vacuous chamber in the presence of metallic particles such as gold, silver or platinum. Then, a low-voltage current is passed through the quartz and the metal particles adhere, electrostatically, to the quartz creating hues of irridescent blue, ruby red, and irridescent pearl or white respectively.

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Some of my many good friends and kin have already made lovely comments. I am very touched. It makes me feel all orangey inside. Nice. Thanks +

Why is it that no matter how much you tread on a lawn with daisies, these beauties always spring back up again with their pure white and proud petals and their sunny centres? To me, daisies demonstrate that there is a place in this idiotic world for eternal optimism and unconditional happiness. They keep springing back up. So can we. These ones were photographed in the Imperial Forum in Rome (April 2005). They’ve obviously been happy for a long time. Enjoy.

These two ladybirds were mating on the leaves of one of the leaves of an oriental poppy in our garden (May 2005). It’s good to see these things still happen in the middle of one of the most innocuous cities in Britain.  How wonderful.

Sweet orange, Citrus sinensis. This one here is still on its tree in March, in the centre of Rome, after the rain. The finest marmalade is made from Seville or bitter oranges, pithy and full of large pectin-filled pips, Citrus aurantium. Apparently, oranges are considered to be berries as they hold multiple seeds (pips) and come from a single ovary, but you can read more about that kind of thing at ‘Wikipedia Orange (fruit)’.

About the only annual culinary tradition I have maintained is making marmalade in January. It is getting to that time when the bright Sevilles will appear in our green grocers (those of us who have them, or else from the super-dupermarket), their knarled pock-marked skins begging to be turned into gorgeous, shiney jam. The thick (who’d have thin?) shreds oosing that palette-cleansing bitter-sweetness. It’s like smelting bronze. I use the cut-and-boil method, rather than the boil-the-oranges-whole method. I don’t like the idea of boiling oranges whole. Different sugars and few extra ingredients (brandy, whiskey perhaps?) could be used to vary the ‘original’. I find unrefined sugar the best. Muscavado sugar makes a thinner, darker jam which resembles the fir of a grizzly bear, the orange flecks falling through it light sparks from the sun.

January is a month that remains dark, even though the days are meant to be betting longer. The world doesn’t really yield us much proper light until well into February. It probably doesn’t help that it’s so grey, very grey indeed and then that grey gives into dirty brown in the afternoon/evening. At least that’s what happens where I am at the moment. This is why oranges are so good in January. They are our mini-suns. Go on, have one. Gorgeous.