personal history | Ramblingrose

Welcome to my blog/journal/whatever

This is the real guts of this website. The old website and its archived posts is still available at its old url. Newcomers might like to dip into it every now and then.

Welcome to you all. Amazingly I still don't seem to be running out of ideas on what to write - well occasionally - but I have my writer's block strategies to turn to - see the text on the right. Check this page for the latest posts and if something interests you just click on it. It's easy to leave a comment and I love to read them. And now you can subscribe to the blog and get emailed notifications of new posts. And sorry I just don't understand Facebook.

"We are not here for long. So let's at least make ourselves something good to eat."

Nigel Slater

"I was born hungry, not a cook."

Julia Child

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well"

Virginia Woolf

Writer's block

Every now and then I can't think of a suitable topic and so I have devised a few strategies to get around this.

Lucky dip

The first strategy I devised is to go to one of my three cook book bookshelves, close my eyes and pick a book. Close my eyes again and pick a page. It's really quite an enlightening method of getting over writer's block.

'A word from'

My second strategy is to devote a post to the thoughts of one of my favourite cooks. Hopefully it will introduce them to you

Or

I shall choose a picture I have come across and extemporise on that.

A second kind of lucky dip

I have been thinking about first recipes in cook books - so I shall choose a book not quite randomly and then look at the first recipe for inspiration.

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enjoy

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Chasing culinary white whales

"It’s not until you come to make it yourself that you see what’s not written down.” Felicity Cloake This is my culinary white whale - and I apologise for it not being one of my mother's dishes. Which is not to say that I don't make things that my mother did, and that I don't remember those dishes with all those warm and cuddly feelings the cooking world would like us to have when we think of mum's cooking - or even better - grandma's cooking. And I will come to mum and gra

May 4

A farewell with finger sandwiches and dainty teacups

Two days ago I went to a funeral of this lovely lady here. Her name is Shell and she was a member of my 'old ladies book group'. I hope they do not mind the name but we are indeed all old. Shell was one of the oldest - she was I think 94 when she died. This is her on her ninetieth birthday I believe. This is the book group I joined, maybe a year after we arrived in Australia, maybe 1970 - before children for us all. Of course the members have changed over the years. She

Apr 29

Making a mark

I have a folder on my computer desktop supposedly full of ideas for blog posts, which I look at occasionally. Uninspired again - today is one of those days - I opened the folder marked 'moments in time' and found this - a patch of cacti, somewhere near St. Tropez I seem to recall, on which people have engraved their names or initials, mostly representing a moment of love. Whether those moments endured into the future of their making is, of course, unknown. It reminded me of

Apr 26

The sounds of silence

"a clear, definitive sound connected to your past can bring back details you might never have remembered again." Danny Wallace/The Guardian Yes I know - this painting by Giorgio de Chirico has absolutely nothing to do with kitchens and sounds. But it started me out on this particular post, and introduced me to a series of paintings by an artist I knew little about. And honestly I don't really like his paintings, but they are arresting. I really felt I should say something

Apr 15

Cabbage and the vagaries of memory

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." Marcel Proust This was going to be a relatively straightforward post inspired by the idea that 2026 is the year of the cabbage - which I I have been mulling over for a while - which would then be an occasion to talk about my favourite recipe for cabbage and finally being nudged into action about these things by Ottolenghi's latest newsletter which talked about all things cabbage. However,

Apr 12

Today

"it's those black clouds that make the blue skies even more beautiful." Kelly Clarkson In the spirit of yesterday's post about tiny moments of joy herewith a photograph. I was actually out in the garden trying to find something to match the above quote - it is now a blue sky day - when I saw this flower. I took the photograph not just because of its innate beauty, but because it is a small miracle attached to two tiny stories. First story - shortly after we moved into this

Mar 21

Why am I doing this?

"These diminutive pleasures are there if we care to look for them, little joys illuminating an increasingly darkening world. They feed the soul and nourish the spirit. Or at least they do mine." Nigel Slater Every now and then, I go through a phase of wondering why I keep writing this blog, particularly at the times when I am somewhat uninspired - like now, and so I was interested to read an article highlighted by Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman, in The New Yorker. The wr

Mar 20

Handwritten

"a small labour in these copy-and-photograph times." Rachel Roddy She means copy and paste surely? Yesterday I was a bit uninspired and so I started looking through the Ideas pages in my little notebook of various nudges into blog posts and there at the top of the page on the right is an idea from Rachel Roddy, which I wasn't really up for yesterday, although I did check out the article, which was, as always with her, an interesting one. So today, having survived the threa

Mar 2

Happy days

"Happy days roll onward leading up to golden years." Alfred Lord Tennyson Every now and then I change my computer desktop wallpaper - I think that's what they call it - from a photograph picked from my photo libraries - almost at random. This is what I chose the day before yesterday - such a happy picture - of a holiday in France 20 years ago, when I was a mere 62 years old. A baby, with many of those golden years still to come. The group consists of two sets of university

Jan 6

Wasting time

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". J.R.R Tolkien Yesterday I was on the verge of giving all of this up. I'd found that quote above whilst looking for an economics quote the day before and I was feeling low. When you read one of those quotes - there are lots that say almost the same thing - and it's a bit corny - they drag you down a bit and I was down already because I had awoken down, possibly because of that quote, and then had gone for

Nov 7, 2025