Living Wittily

Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur - a tribute :)

Now I don't often advertise on this blog. But when it comes to food those roadside oases where weary travellers can stop and be refreshed by good food, hot drinks, pleasant service, - well, such places are hard to find. So when you find one, become evangelical about it. Witness to others about your experience. Share with other weary travellers the good news that there is indeed a place of quiet rest, of spread tables, where the body as well as the soul is restored.

Now let's be clear. I'm talking about the food, the people who make it and serve it, the price, and its convenience to the road. I'm not talking about ambience, plush surroundings, expense generating window dressing. I'm talking about "Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur"; translation You Could Go Further and Do Much Worse".

At the Stracathro Service Station, about 40 miles South of Aberdeen, this transport cafe is one of the best stopping places I know. Yes the tables are formica topped. The interior is about utility, hard wearing carpet, factory standard lighting. But the food. Honest, real, cooked on the premises and served by people absolutely confident that what you get to eat is substantial, not fast food, good value and no nonsense. Nonsense usually consists of high prices for low quality. This place reverses that - high quality low prices.

Take last night. travelling from Glasgow to Aberdeen, I had a light meal with friends before tackling the M8 and onwards. Two hours or thereabouts gets me to beyond Dundee and near Brechin. Time to stop. It shuts at 9.00. I get there by 8.30. What do I have? Forget the coffee and expensive pastry! Or the Coffee and fat laden muffin! Anyway they only serve home baking done in house or locally. No. I have a mug of tea. And a bowl of baked rice pudding!!! Probably the same calories as one of those soft, wet gooey muffin things - but different culinary cosmos. Nutmeg skin, warm and sweet - and by the way I declined the jug of cream that goes with it. I was looked upon by the smiling no nonsense rice pudding dispenser as someone who had flipped their lid.

"No cream? You want milk? Milk?? In my rice pudding???"

I quote exactly.

By the time I got back in the car and started the final leg home, the inner man was renewed, a kind of spiritual glow that had little to do with religious devotion - unless rice pudding can be considered sacramental......

A strange mixture of a day - of funerals and laughter

Yesterday was a strange mixture of a day. Made up of attending a funeral standing for over an hour in a packed church; being at the afternoon session of our Baptist Assembly; having a meal out with friends between Assembly sessions; and then the evening Assembly session through most of which I was by then exhausted.

At the funeral met people I hadn't seen for anywhere between 35 and 5 years - some of them thought I'd aged. Is it that obvious 35 years on.....? The funeral itself was for Linda. We've known Linda and Jim for, well, 35 years, nearly all our married life, and been friends all that time. The funeral service was an experience that even this experienced pastor found heartbreakingly comforting, emotionally overwhelming in a way that seems even the day after, both inexplicable and right.

You see Jim presented the eulogy for Linda, preceded by a Visual Tribute of family photographs showing Linda as she was from baby to this year. And in what Jim said, he ministered to those who were there sharing in his love and gratitude for the life of his wife and lifelong friend. Then this man who couldn't sing, told of how during Linda's illness he took voice coaching so he could sing at her funeral, the love song that had meant so much to them as a couple down the years and in these past months. Being their friends for all these years, knowing the two of them, and hearing a non singer singing so well in leading a congregation, is simply one of the most moving events I've ever shared. And this was no exercise in denial - we all knew the reality of what was lost, and along with the promise of comfort within that loss, the deep human bonds of recognition that lie at the heart of love and loss, joy and grief, life and death - and how in the best friendships, these are shared.

May Sarton the poet once warned against wasting life's deepest experiences by being so busy in life we move on without assimilating and understanding what they have done to us. So maybe sometime later, when all of this is assimilated, I'll want to write something more - and only with Jim's permission. For now I am simply humbled though not puzzled, by how the love of these two people was made so astonishingly evident and then given as a gift to Linda, and us.

And the rest of the day went by in a haze - except the moment at the evening Assembly Session when, sitting with my friend Catriona of Skinny Fair-Trade Latte fame, the hymn THESE ARE THE DAYS OF ELIJAH was announced.

That was a moment of clarifying mischief, electrifying accidental providence, belief-defying coincidence (or did I pre-arrange it - no honest, I didn't!!) Eye-contact with Catriona came dangerously near irreverent guffaw. Instead I sang it with triumphalist gusto! If you read this Catriona, you can explain the metaphysical implications of your least favourite Assembly hymn being chosen at your first Scottish Assembly.

A strange mixture of a day.................

Julian of Norwich and mile high apple pie

Ever since I came across this modern icon of Julian of Norwich and her contemplative cat (which bears an uncanny resemblance to Gizmo Gordon), I've enjoyed occasionally setting it as my desktop background. Not wonderful art, but it does capture something of the crisp clarity with which this woman theologian thought and wrote about the revelations of divine love she had received.

Several years ago I was invited to teach a course on Julian and her remarkable book in New Hampshire, New England. It was February and the temperatures were between 6 degrees and -25 degrees. The students were a mixed group of mature, persistently curious, hungry-to-learn, Christian, cultured folk from the villages and hamlets around Hanover, New Hampshire - they were a joy to teach, and fun to be with. They came on three consecutive all day Saturdays, on one day through a blizzard. And as we thought about the world, our lives and God, Julian the medieval contemplative became a favourite source of wise optimism. Her sense of God as 'our courteous Lord', and of God's purposes as ensuring 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well', provided a strong sub-structure from which we explored the spirituality of divine love in a broken world.

And then to walk out in the snow, wrapped up in layers of wool and other heat preserving fibres, enjoying the cold because we knew we would soon be warm - I've never forgotten the friendship and conversations, and am still in touch with one or two of the folk.

So now when I read Julian I think of blue skies, white snow, millions of trees, praline flavoured latte, and mile-high apple pie! Oh the ascetic life!

haute cuisine = hot food

Having just had a routine cholesterol check I thought I’d pen a panegyric in praise of porridge. Forget tasteless glutinous gunge – people queue for this stuff at Mash (haute cuisine establishment!) in London!

The medical benefits are universally recognised. Here's a quote:

"Soluble fibre which is found in fruit, vegetables, peas, beans and of course, oats, helps reduce blood cholesterol. It’s a complex process but, put simply, think of rolled oats as tiny sponges in your body that soak up cholesterol".

Well it must be good if Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, Jane Fonda and Tim Henman (oh, and Wallace and Gromit) are celebrity consumers.

Roald Amundsen even took it to the South Pole – I wonder if Scott did – would be a good advert for Scott’s Porridge Oats.(Picture on left illustrates the export version - American spelling! Picture also shows shot putt being thrown over cliff?!)

Anyway – Sheila and I have porridge at least a couple of times a week. Apart from all the above pluses, it’s supposed to release seritonin, which helps you feel less depressed by the long dark, wet, windy, dreich West of Scotland winters. But making porridge has a down side - Who cleans the pot afterwards? Because when a porridge pot cools it develops a thick gelatinous coating which, when it comes to washing the pot…….yeuk!

Scouring out the porridge pot,
Round and round and round.

Out with all the scraith and scoopery,
Lift the eely ooly droopery,
Chase the glubbery slubbery gloopery ,
Round and round and round.

Out with all the doleful dithery,
Ladle out the slimey slithery,
Hunt and catch the hithery thithery ,
Round and round and round.

Out with all the ubbly gubbly,
On the stove it burns so bubbly,
Use a spoon and use it doubly,
Round and round and round.

For a fact sheet on the dietary benefits of porridge, Scotland's contribution to health food, see http://www.flahavans.com/home/facts.htm