A little more about perfectionism. One day last week I was persuaded by the small grandchildren to buy them one of those children’s magazines with rather shoddy plastic toys attached to the front, in this case very small plastic kittens and animal hospital equipment. It’s the sort of stuff that imaginative children can use to create endless games, which is precisely what our grandchildren did.
Inside the magazine was a recipe idea for making bread roll in the shape of hedgehogs: smooth, pointy-nosed face, raisins for eyes and sculpted spikes on the back. So on Sunday, when the family was coming to dinner I decided to make “breadgehogs”, as the seven year old named them. Well, making the dough was simple enough, standard procedure, but I’m not sure what the magazine people did to their bread dough to make it stay in shape while they baked the rolls. Their rolls did look quite hedgehoggy in the photos. Mine on the other hand didn’t even look as hedgehoggy as theirs did before going into the oven. Once in the oven, they continued to rise and swell, which probably made for lighter, fluffier, tastier rolls but meant that any semblance of spikes mostly disappeared. Once you knew they were meant to be hedgehogs I suppose you could pick out one or two with some aspect of hedgehogginess about them. How we laughed!
They were, however, quite tasty. the small people were very polite about the artistic qualities (or lack of the same) and their older sibling took one away with her to make her lunch for work the next day! An imperfect success!
Now, I am fortunate. I can fuss about the nature of the bread rolls I bake. I can “waste” money on children’s magazines, knowing full well that our small grandchildren have more than enough toys to play with. And besides, the seven year old is quite capable of making cute kittens herself out of clay. She’s become quite adept at fashioning all sorts of creatures which we then ‘bake’ in my oven.
Many people are not so fortunate. In this article once upon a time Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes about the rise and rise of food banks and other such related problems.
Here are a few selected bits of facts and figure:
“There are 850 cinemas in Britain today and three times as many food banks. There are 1,200 hospitals and twice as many food banks. There are more food banks than there are public libraries.”
“A mere 35 (foodbanks) were provided by the Trussell Trust in 2010 and they had to increase twentyfold to 650 in 2013 and then double again to 1,300 in 2019.”
With the addition of independent food banks, there are now 2,800.
it’s not just food, of course:
“For worsening poverty is causing not only hunger but ill health and squalor. Mothers find that after skimping and scraping to feed hungry bodies, they cannot afford to buy basic toiletries to keep austerity’s children clean. According to The Hygiene Bank, 3 million people are experiencing hygiene poverty. Instead of soap becoming more available at a decent price, families are paying 13% more for liquid soap than they did a year ago. Children coming to school unwashed and without clean clothes is often the first public sign that a family is in crisis. That is why many food banks are now providing toilet rolls, nappies, toothpaste, soap and shampoo.”
He doesn’t mention sanitary products for the women - just another aspect of the crisis.
“Seventy per cent of poor children are in working families, and instead of the indignity of breadwinners having to beg for bread, food banks want their users to enjoy the dignity of well-paid work.”
This is the 21st century equivalent of the humiliation of ending up in the workhouse in Dickensian times!
At the other end of the scale we have the rich collectors who are apparently buying dinosaur bones. This sounds innocent enough … apart form the fact that museums and scientists are then unable to carry out research into dinosaurs.
I was reminded of Tracy Chevalier’s novel “Remarkable Creatures”, the story of Mary Anning, real-life 19th century fossil collector and palaeontologist, making great discoveries in and around Lyme Regis, at a time when women were not eligible to join the Geological Society of London, or indeed even considered capable of scientific stuff. Even then rich folk were buying fossils and bits of dinosaurs for their private collections. And women were fighting to be recognised as having good brains!
I was reminded of Tracy Chevalier’s novel “Remarkable Creatures”, the story of Mary Anning, real-life 19th century fossil collector and palaeontologist, making great discoveries in and around Lyme Regis, at a time when women were not eligible to join the Geological Society of London, or indeed even considered capable of scientific stuff. Even then rich folk were buying fossils and bits of dinosaurs for their private collections. And women were fighting to be recognised as having good brains!
Grandson Number Two, a four year old expert on dinosaurs, lover of wood lice and all things creepy-crawly and preferably messily disgusting, would no doubt love to discover a dinosaur skeleton. Could we persuade him to part with it, even for millions of pounds?
Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!
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