Cottage Pie for Supper!

Here is my Cottage Pie, not really very good...

What I grew up calling Shepherd's Pie is not really Shepherd's Pie, it is Cottage Pie; in the UK and Ireland Shepherd's Pie is made with lamb or mutton while our Cottage Pie is made with beef. The French call Shepherd's Pie pâté chinois or pâté à l’anglaise, but they differentiate between the two, as we should. If you live in a cottage and you have a cottage garden then why not make cottage pie for supper? What we call supper some people call dinner; but supper is our last meal of the day, the third meal of three. At supper you sup if you are sipping a bowl of soup, or not, and it comes from the Middle English, mid-1200s AD, to eat. We have three meals a day, breakfast (when the fast of sleep ends), lunch (which some people call dinner or used to call dinner back when we were farmers and needed a large midday meal). And supper. People today have snacks and are referred to as grazing, eating all day and anytime you want like a cow in the field; no wonder we're so fat. 

My grandfather, from Blackburn, Lancashire, I am told by my mother, used to eat tongue and other animal parts we wouldn't want to eat. Maybe the words breakfast, lunch, and dinner are a part of my northern English heritage, working class and less trendy than the south of England. But breakfast, lunch, and dinner are, for the most part, what they're called in Canada. When my mother passed away in 2014 I inherited a copy of Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book (the 1923 edition) from her, it had belonged to her mother who moved to Canada around 1911. I understand that Mrs. Beeton never actually tried out her recipes before publishing them in her cook book, and most of her recipes would not satisfy the taste of people today. Mrs. Beeton's Shepherd's Pie is unlike any recipe for Shepherd's Pie that I have seen, many of the ingredients in today's recipes are absent from Mrs. Beeton's book; they are plain and simple cooking. My copy of her book is well-worn and contains this recipe for Shepherd's Pie: 

Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book (1923)

In the left column is Mrs. Beeton's recipe for Shepherd's Pie

Now, I turn to my Cottage Pie. I don't really know what I've done wrong but it wasn't all that good. I've done better in the past. Where did I get the idea that I should place a layer of frozen peas or corn between the mashed potatoes and the meat? My layer of mashed potatoes was too thin, I ended up with a large slice of meat and very little potato, but I love potato. The ground beef, the leanest variety, came out kind of thick and hard... Overall, a disappointment. Three out of ten.

Roses, The Regenerative Power of Nature

These three photographs were taken in July 2021.

When we moved into this house in June 1997, a neighbour remembered the previous owner for her garden. I am not sure that she was accurate, there was very little sign that any gardening had gone on here. But there were two rose bushes behind the house; I am told that the way to get roses to bloom is to feed them, make sure they are in the sun, and in the fall to cut them back to about two feet from the ground and wrap them for the winter or cover them with mulch. I did none of these. Time passed, years passed, and these two rose bushes survived my neglect; they didn't thrive but they didn't die. I found a plastic label for one of the roses in the earth, they are Tea Roses; I know so little about roses that, to me, their flowers don't even look like roses.

Then, a few years ago, I began to work on the backyard garden and I called it a Canadian cottage garden as distinct from the much loved English country garden. I noticed that the two rose bushes, planted by the previous owner, were still alive; I bought and planted a third rose bush even though I've never had much luck with roses. I am not, I guess, a rose person... Early last spring, 2021, one of the two original rose buses looked as though it had died; I tried to dig it up but I was lazy and gave up on it; that rose bush was more tenacious than I realized. For a few weeks the two surviving rose bushes thrived, I've never had so many roses! Then, one day, I noticed a neighbour's roses, they were incredibly abundant and remained so all summer and, even yesterday, they had flowers although now covered with the first frost of the season. My roses lasted a few weeks, died, and that was the end of them; my neighbour's roses bloomed all summer and fall. Looking at the photographs of my roses leaves me wondering what kind of roses they are. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the rose bush I thought had died was still alive, it had survived the previous winter, it had survived my neglect. Well, what do you know? All three rose bushes are now alive; I will wrap them with burlap for the winter and look after them better in the future.

Here is part of a longer quotation from Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel, Autumn, in which he mentions the regenerative power of nature: "Life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening." Written after he hacked away at an apple tree, then was concerned that he might have killed the tree, and a few months later had more apples than ever before. Despite everything, nature affirms life. And this is one of the things that gives me hope, no matter what terrible things people do to the world, to Earth, nature will soon return and reclaim what we have leveled, built on, destroyed, polluted, and desecrated.

These three photographs were take in July 2020, also an excellent garden summer.

Mother of Muses, sing for me, by Bob Dylan

                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me
                                                Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea
                                                Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest
                                                Sing your hearts out, all your women of the chorus
                                                Sing of honor and fate and glory be
                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me

                                                Mother of Muses, sing for my heart
                                                Sing of a love too soon to depart
                                                Sing of the heroes who stood alone
                                                Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone
                                                Who struggled with pain so the world could go free
                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me

                                                Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott
                                                And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
                                                Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
                                                Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
                                                Who did what they did and they went on their way
                                                Man, I could tell their stories all day

                                                I'm falling in love with Calliope
                                                She don't belong to anyone, why not give her to me?
                                                She's speaking to me, speaking with her eyes
                                                I've grown so tired of chasing lies
                                                Mother of Muses, wherever you are
                                                I've already outlived my life by far

                                                Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath
                                                Things I can't see, they're blocking my path
                                                Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate
                                                Put me upright, make me walk straight
                                                Forge my identity from the inside out
                                                You know what I'm talking about

                                                Take me to the river, release your charms
                                                Let me lay down a while in your sweet, loving arms
                                                Wake me, shake me, free me from sin
                                                Make me invisible, like the wind
                                                Got a mind that ramble, got a mind that roam
                                                I'm travelin' light and I'm a-slow coming home

               

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

Mother of Muses lyrics © Special Rider Music, Universal Tunes

To the Muses, by William Blake

 

                                        Whether on Ida's shady brow,
                                        Or in the chambers of the East,
                                        The chambers of the sun, that now
                                        From ancient melody have ceas'd;

                                        Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
                                        Or the green corners of the earth,
                                        Or the blue regions of the air,
                                        Where the melodious winds have birth;

                                        Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
                                        Beneath the bosom of the sea
                                        Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
                                        Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

                                        How have you left the ancient love
                                        That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
                                        The languid strings do scarcely move!
                                        The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

William Blake, Poetical Sketches (London, 1783)

"Invocation" by Denise Levertov

 

                                    Silent, about-to-be-parted-from house.
                                    Wood creaking, trying to sigh, impatient.
                                    Clicking of squirrel-teeth in the attic.
                                    Denuded beds, couches stripped of serapes.
                                    

                                    Deep snow shall block all entrances
                                    and oppress the roof and darken
                                    the windows.     O Lares,
                                    don’t leave.
                                    The house yawns like a bear.
                                    Guard its profound dreams for us,
                                    that it return to us when we return.

November 1969

Community Gardens, Rosedale and Cote St-Luc Road

 This community garden is just two blocks from where I live, on Rosedale Avenue just above Cote St- Luc Road. This isn't a mini-farm, it's gardeners growing vegetables and flowers for their own use. These are quite large gardens, tools and supplies are stored in a locked shed, compost bins near the gardens. Photos taken in May 2015, but not much has changed since then.

Garden work in late October

 

Bee balm, cone flowers, and day lilies;
photo taken in August 2021

Due to illness I didn't do much garden work this passed summer, I didn't even sit in the garden that much. I used to sit outside every evening, I'd be entertained by fire flies. The Covid lock down has been great for gardens, we've seen the return of birds not seen for some time, some urban wild life, and honey bees. I noticed, and I wonder if anyone can corroborate this, that in the morning during Covid , around eight or nine a.m., the air in the garden was so fresh and clean, something I have previously noticed only when living in the country. I've pushed myself and done more garden work this September and October than is usual. I've weeded, transplanted plants, put a row of hostas at the rear of the garden, hoed, dug, and watered. What a great time! Inside the house, I look out of my window and I see sunlight in the tops of trees, where the leaves have turned yellow and the autumnal leaves are brilliant when the sun is behind them. Keeping up my outside work, trying to prepare the garden for next summer, I weeded ground cover that came from a neighbour's yard, it was everywhere. I pulled it up, dug up the roots, and then I realized how large a space I had that was mostly wasted on ground cover. I'd been thinking of expanding the garden but always careful not to expand it too much or possibly I wouldn't be able to keep up with what I'd done, or I wouldn't want to do what had become extra work. But this area, by the side of the house path entrance to the garden, is large, and what a great discovery. I have cone flowers that I planted years ago and that have outgrown the space where they were planted. I moved several of these and it was interesting to see how much they had grown, they are very sturdy plants, and I moved about four of these plants to the new space. Something I just noticed that will be discussed another time is a rose bush I thought had died last winter, unbeknownst to me, it was still alive, and returned to life. Nature is resilient. I have not had a lot of success with roses but now this might be changing. Anyhow, I am very happy with the revitalized and renewed garden space just worked on. I thought this space was good before but now I know that, weeded, tidied up, it will thrive next summer.

Cone flowers were under the window on the left, some of them have been moved to 
the newly turned over flower bed; a few weeks ago I trimmed back ivy that covered
the brick walls on two sides of the house; photos taken on 24 October 2021

All of this space was waiting to be cultivated; there is a row of miniature
irises, bee balm that is now established, and some cone flowers

On the far right are some raspberry canes and behind them is a lilac bush that
wasn't expected to survive after being cut down to ground level about ten years
ago; it is now coming back to life and thriving

A bare piece of land doesn't look like much but the soil here
is pretty good and I expect everything will thrive

 

Community Gardens, The City Farm Garden

 

All photos taken in October 2021

I used to post photographs of the City Farm Garden, the area where herbs and flowers were grown, located behind the Hingston residence on the Loyola Campus of Concordia University; this area has been either built on, ploughed under, or left to go wild. Left to go wild is my preference. The larger part of the City Farm Garden seen above, just a few hundred feet from the other area, is thriving and abundant. They grow food that goes to Montreal-area food banks including homeless shelters. . 

No More Progress!

An old 78 RPM recording from my father's record collection

Progress is a mug's game, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's comment on writing poetry. Some people think that society is improving, that it is evolving to some greater state of generosity, kindness, and wealth. It is more likely that it is devolving into all of us being captives to isolation, loneliness, and being defined as consumers. Change is not progress, it is just change, and in our consumer society change is often the replacement of one consumer item for another more expensive item. Change is buying more stuff we mostly don't need. There are other, probably better, examples but for now let's take a simple example of this, about listening to music. 

Long, long ago people listened to music on wax cylinders, then we moved on to single sided 78 RPM records, then two sided 78 RPM records, then to 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums, then to 45 RPM records and then cassette tapes and then CDs, and each time we had to replace our record collections with recordings that worked with the new technology; and then our old records, tapes, and CDs were discarded when we (the editorial we) began buying digitized music--we were really just renting it--and this music (our virtual record collection) was streamed to what we now call our device, farewell record players, tape decks, and CD players; farewell to my grandmother's large wooden console record player with a little box of steel needles and old magazines stored on the shelves below the turn-table. Farewell to scratchy recordings, vinyl recordings, and hello to digitized music so evolved that no one can hear the attraction of listening to digitized sound. Farewell to the human dimension of things. 

Did technology really improve so much that we should care to buy into the next latest technology? I don't think so. We could have stayed at vinyl records, and there seem to be enough people who agree with this as 33 1/3 RPM vinyl recordings are making a come-back. We discarded our old record collections when they became obsolete, meaning that the machine required to play this music was no longer being manufactured and new vinyl recordings were also not being made. I always liked to collect certain things, for instance books and old postage stamps, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums and compact discs; I listened to my father's 78 RPM records, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glen Miller; I bought CDs of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison and others. This music was a part of my life.

The last music I wanted to buy were the complete Glen Gould recordings of J.S. Bach, but the technology changed before I could begin; so, farewell to me as a consumer of music. I stopped buying any music when CDs became obsolete; at the most, now, I listen to some music on YouTube. I put all of my CDs onto my computer thinking I would listen to them as I sat writing, I've never listened to any of these copies of my CDs. Human nature hasn't been factored into the mania for "progress". Some of us like to collect things, to have an album cover to look at and liner notes to read, to have something an album or a book that we paid for and then to put it on a shelf; it seems this desire to collect things has been forgotten.  

It is possible (or is it wishful thinking) that a failed technology is the digitized book, while they are still being sold the demand for digitized books seems to have plateaued (except for text books). The paper book, two covers containing pages with printed writing on each page, is among the the greatest technological inventions, it is also inexpensive,  and it will not be replaced; the world of learning, spirituality, and entertainment is available in books, whether a poem, a detective novel, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, or the King James translation of the bible. The replacement of paper book technology didn't work because digital technology could not compete with the older paper format, a book is tactile and people like to hold a book, write notes in the margins, fold a corner (God forbid!) as a book mark, write their name and date when purchased or read on the cover page, give books as gifts, own a copy of the book, and buy books used or second hand; of course, Amazon and others tried to replace books with Kindle, etc. But books are still among the greatest technological inventions in history. For a while book stores were closing, replaced by Amazon, who wanted to sell digitized books that you could read on your Kindle that they also sold. They wanted to sell the device and then sell the customer a digitized book; it was a means to divert profit from the publishers to, in this case, Amazon. 

Digitized books peaked and paper copies of books are now selling more copies than ever. It used to be a sign of learning and intelligence to have, in your home, bookshelves filled with books and some of us enjoyed browsing at the titles of a friend's home library. Your books reflected who you were, what kind of interests you had, even your education. Not the best example but a fun example, remember the old Dell detective novels, they were purposely designed to be small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans; some people used to walk around with a book in their back pocket, reading was that important to people. Remember the map on the back cover of these books? Remember buying second hand copies of these Dell books just for the cover art? They are still worth collecting and the Dell novels are still worth reading. We have fond memories of these and other books, we don't have fond memories of Kindle books, browsing Amazon's website, storing music in the Cloud, or what have you. It hasn't quite worked out as they had planned. People still enjoy visiting book stores, not just shopping online. But the damage is done regarding music, I doubt I will ever visit a record store again, I don't even think there are any left in Montreal. 

Fall planting of hostas

We've had a mild October this year, it was +20 C yesterday and most of the previous two weeks; however, it is raining today (on Saturday) and the coming days will be in the +10 C range. This means it's been great weather to get out and work in the garden, in my case moving or transplanting hostas. One of the advantages of perennial plants is that they are perennial, you buy them once and not only do you have them year after year, but they multiply, and then you can divide them and have more of the same plants; plus, you buy them only once so you aren't paying for them a second or third summer. Perennials are the gift that keeps on giving... Frugality is something the government of Canada needs to learn as we are now half way to a trillion dollar debt. Meanwhile, annuals look great for one summer and then, in October, they end up in the compost or the garbage; I've seen piles of geraniums thrown out, still in bloom, they could easily have been overwintered indoors and planted the following spring. 

    About five years ago I planted four hostas in the front of the house, as a border to the walk, as well as other hostas planted in the backyard; I decided to move two of these plants to the back yard garden and that's what I did last week. In fact, I also moved a few other hostas into this same long row at the very rear of the garden, it has the effect of pulling the whole garden together. This backyard, my Canadian cottage garden, is not very large and it doesn't get a lot of sunlight except where the house abuts the backyard and even what sunlight I get isn't guaranteed, it depends on the time of day; in other words, nowhere does this garden get twelve straight hours of summer sunlight on a single day as do the gardens of some of my neighbours. I don't have a great love for hostas; I like hostas, but... so, planting these hostas was a matter of convenience and even necessity, it is all that will grow where I planted them; also, they are perennials and there are many varieties of hostas, they will grow and flourish in the shade and I like them well enough. 

You can see where two hostas have been removed, they were the same size as the hostas on either side of the remaining hostas; by the way, hostas are easy to dig up, even four or five years after first planting them the root ball was more or less intact. It is also easy to divide the root ball prior to transplanting them.

Here we see the row of hostas only half planted; this is very poor soil and it's beside some cedars and below an apple tree, so not the greatest place to grow anything.

Here is the completed row of hostas, they'll look better next year or the year after next. It was only after planting them that I realized how they completed the garden; the hostas gave a sense of enclosure to the garden as a whole, a sense of completion. 

I planted these hydrangeas and the hostas in the foreground last summer when I also dug this small island in the backyard. It isn't a lot of work to dig up small sections of grass and, one thing I've noted, is that an island also creates green space surrounding it, it creates paths. I enlarged this area this summer and, recently, I moved the hostas further away from the hydrangeas. By the way, the hydrangeas were moved from the front lawn area where they were too plentiful. I don't throw out any plants or bushes. 

The Village Shopping Plaza in early October

It is inevitable that the Village Shopping Plaza will be demolished and become the site of spanking new paper thin wall condos! My new motto is "No More Progress, Please". Look at what has already been lost, stores, a restaurant, a place where people could meet and talk; it was, after all, the village shopping plaza, not the city shopping plaza but a community. Did people stop shopping here? Most likely, but whatever happened it was also the fault of whoever owned this complex, they didn't keep up with the times and then land became more valuable than the building and so, voilà, where we are today. Progress is not just exchanging the old for what is new and more profitable (excuse my naivete!), that is how we define progress in our society and it is a false definition. In the meantime, nature or urban wildlife is returning to this area, the other day I saw a hawk sitting on a railing behind the building.  

“The Stare's Nest by My Window”, by W.B. Yeats

 

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies;

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Note: the more times I read this poem by Yeats the more impressed I am by it, especially the last stanza. Re. "the stare", it reads on the Internet: "The first urban roost ever recorded was in Dublin's downtown plane trees in the 1840s, when the starling was the "stare" (an Old English word for the bird) and bought for food in city markets."

Hi Bob, Yes, I am back out walking

Yes, I am back out walking, I aim for a daily walk, it is my favourite exercise. Here we are again at the corner of Cote St. Luc Road and Robert Burns Avenue, a property that continues to deteriorate. I suppose whoever owns this property is waiting for a buyer, or demolition and building permits, or architectural plans. In the meantime we have a building in which the electricity has been cut off and with the changing seasons the whole thing is in a state of decline and deterioration. Last week I saw a hawk sitting on one of the railings in the photograph below. Nature is returning to the Covid cities we inhabit. But nothing stands for long in the way of making money so these buildings must not only go, new buildings (condos, most likely) will be built here.