Bauble

Today

Here is Christmas, knocking on the door once more. We have bought some child=friendly Christmas tree decorations and, a few weeks ago, I picked up a box of 14 very pretty baubles. In fact, I now have so many Christmas decorations that I could trim about a dozen trees and have offered spares to Facebook friends.

We have also fixed up the fairy lights, outside and in, and hung a variety of wreaths and garlands up.

"We are so much more affluent these days", said Paul "when I was a child the decorations were wrapped up so carefully and used each year." "So have these", I said "but the trouble is, I keep buying more..."

In my Day

This conversation made me think about decorations at 4BH. No fairy lights, for one thing. The main decorations were: the tree (of which I've written in previous blogs) and the crepe paper decorations. Each year we would buy packs of coloured crepe paper from Woolworth's. These came in a variety of colours; red and green being prominent, but there were others - a sickly pink shade comes to mind. 

When you got home you removed the outer wrapping and then cut slices, about 2 inches thick across the width of the paper, through all thicknesses. This was quite a tough job for my little fingers.

Once that was done the strips were laid out; Daddy would heave in the tall ladder and attach the end of the strips to the central light fitting, securing with pins, Generally colours were alternated. Next the ladder was moved to one corner of the room and a strip would handed to Daddy. He would twist this so that it formed an elegant spiral and then fixed the end to the corner. The right amount of twist was essential; too much and the paper formed a knot, too little and it drooped dismally. Sometimes pieces were too short and had to be joined. Daddy went round the room in this fashion till we had a sort of pavillion of bright colour above us. I can't find a good picture of what ours looked, but this picture gives you a shadow of an idea.

These would stay until Epiphany when they were taken down and, indeed, preserved until next year.

In my teens I became rather snooty about these and would spent hours making giant snowflakes or paper angels to hang from the ceiling.

But they were a jolly show for little cash; pity we don't have ceiling light fittings at Spencer House!

Sludge

Today

We've both been feeling a bit rough for the past few days and I haven't felt up to much cooking. "Oh"said Paul " let's just have pasta; that's always easy." So I made some rigatoni with a high-class commercial sauce, pine kernels, rocket and Parmesan.

In My Day

When I was a child, Pasta was certainly not the easy option. You could get macaroni and, in very smart shops, unfeasibly long spaghetti in blue paper wrappings. At home, we only consumed macaroni cheese.

Later on, the main pasta staple of many households was Heinz spaghetti, which came in tins and was often served on toast and fed to un-numbered unsuspecting infants in the '70s and '80s. I certainly had tins in my cupboard, as well as alphabetti-spaghetti for special treats.


I think it was Clement Freud who described this food as "Worms in tomato sludge" in a Sunday supplement article. He also, I believe, introduced the terms "al dente" into the chattering classes' lexicon of cookery terms. 

By the time we lived at Rowan Avenue in the late '70s, I had mastered the art of cooking spaghetti al dente (having an Italian sister-in-law helped) even though my cupboard continued to sport those Heinz nasties for some years to come.

I remember one occasion, when my sister Beatrice and her husband-to-be, Nick were living with us. Beatrice and I had a long walk home in the cold from the station and that night the chaps thought they'd surprise us with dinner on the table when we walked in the door. Paul heaved out the spaghetti in the blue wrapper. "How long do you cook it for?" he asked Nick. "I don't know; 20 minutes?" hazarded Nick. Maybe he thought that pasta was just an Italian form of potato.

We walked through the door to a delicious smell and plates heaped with home-cooked worms in tomato sludge. We tried, we really did, to eat the dinner, but eventually the thick slimy white ropes defeated us.


Do you know, a few years ago, a friend of mine so yearned after some Heinz Spaghetti hoops on toast that Paul bought some specially and made them for her as a nostalgic treat.