CAST (in order of appearance)
Daniel (Ysabelle's partner)
Occasional Speeder (RR's younger daughter)
Ysabelle/Bella (RR's granddaughter)
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Daniel (Famed for fearing "different" food): Remember when I had mussels? Good times.
Occasional Speeder: Yeah – I remember – the “Allo Allo” thing came on – and Bella was like that Peter Kay sketch about the wedding disco DJ: “What’s he saying – eh? Oh he said “mussels” I heard that.”
So off we went to the centre with BG (Big Grandad - ie, RR) and got mussels off a man with no teeth. Then LG (Little Grannie - ie, VR) got involved cleaning them– then I did the stuffing and Bella and LG were sorting stuff – then LG cooked them but best of all – you tried them. And you ate quite a few. But I think you knocked wine on mine – but it was ok because there were many.
L’Equipe lay on the table, a lilo bobbed on the pool, and wine and cider were distributed. It was warm and lovely and we never wanted to come home.
Don’t miss it at all…
Daniel: Haha, I miss it. lots.
Ysabelle: Me too.
Occasional Speeder (in e-mail to RR): Today we are sad.
PROUST PICKINGS
Another short extract from Swann’s Way:
The hour when an invalid who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under the bedroom door. Oh joy of joys! It is morning…. (But) the ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight, someone has turned out the gas, the last servant has gone to bed…
Never mind Proust - you paint a beautiful holiday picture and I think I may tag along next time! On the subject of mussels, I won't be getting my annual taste of NZ green lipped ones this year, they are huge, I have many shells here to prove the fact.
ReplyDeleteYammie! My mouth waters. Are they sitting on a bed of salt? I place them on a bed of lentils to steady them. Let's invent a thin bean bag for the oven.
ReplyDeletePerhaps a pan with some shallow, oval concavities in the bottom. A prototype could be fashioned from the pictured pan using a hammer (RR has one) and the proper anvil (some portion of an iron railing might suffice). The excerpt is brilliant. Hardship, intensified in the small hours, false promise, re-sentencing.
ReplyDeleteBlonde Two: Staying at the most beautiful place in the world (Port Underwood, east coast of South Island, 25 km south of Picton) we were taken first to the adjacent mussel-beds where green tips were picked for our dinner's first course, thereafter we were given fishing lines to catch the main course: terakihi (later pan fried). After the meal we looked at stars through our host's telescope and watched as the relative rotation of earth gradually pushed Saturn off the viewing area of the lens. Before moving to NZ our host, an American subsequently NZ naturalised, designed F1 cars. Magic. eh?
ReplyDeleteEllena: No stabilisation necssary. The stuffing holds the mussel in the shell; heat from the grill "fixes" the stuffing.
MikeM: See re-comment to Ellena.
Hammer. Curious coincidence. JK, who owned our first apartment when we moved to the USA (3214 Annapolis Avenue, Dormont, Pittsburgh) gave me a ball-peen hammer to help me on my way through the New World. Long after I moved back to the UK I was part of a group of European journalists invited to a steel-works in Venezuela. We formed up with the US contingent in New York, one of which was - JK! I'd never realised he too was a magazine journalist.
Proust. The long sentences are inescapable. Yet the vivid recognisable scenes are often created out of direct and comparatively simple language. My aim with these excerpts is to clear up one or two misconceptions, that's all.
Robbie - Kiwi Magic eh? It gets into your soul. And is also the name of a boat, KZ7, look it up ...
ReplyDelete