Disaster, determination and delight in this week's newsletter

A powerful personal story, some fascinating historic homes and a culinary calamity all feature in this week's Heyday Friday newsletter

Hello!

Are you as fascinated by other people’s homes and the way they live in them as I am? If you are, then you’d enjoy going to somewhere I visited recently as much as I did.

To be clear, I’m not talking about modern homes here. Quite the contrary. These are meticulously renovated and restored homes (and other community buildings) dating from the Middle Ages up to Victorian times.

But they are homes that you can walk into and around, and which look pretty much exactly as they would have done when the families who inhabited them lived there, right down to the cooking utensils and bedding.

Here’s the exterior of one of them

Of course you’ll have to read this week’s blog to find out where this really rather fabulous place is. Which you can do by CLICKING HERE.

When you do read the blog, you’ll also discover a shocking fact about the daily bread eaten by the poorest in society centuries ago. And I reveal the location’s unexpected (to me, anyway) connection with one of television’s best-loved programmes.

HERE’S that link again, because now you really want to read it, don’t you.

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FRIDAY FUN FACT

(pic from where THE BLOG is all about)

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THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN…….WATCHING

My goodness, what a powerful, haunting documentary this is.

Clemency Burton-Hill was a successful writer, broadcaster, award winning amateur violin player, and the mother of two young sons, one of whom she was still breast feeding, when she suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage in January 2020 at the age of 38.

When we first see her she is living her life at full tilt. Having presented Breakfast on BBC Radio 3 for a decade as well as the BBC Proms and The Culture Show amongst many others, she has moved to New York to take a dream job as Creative Director for Music & Arts for New York Public Radio.

My Brain: After the Rupture, covers the two years after the medical emergency which it was thought Clemmie wouldn’t survive, and which left her struggling to speak at all, and barely able to move. Watching her fight her way back to reclaim what she can of a life which will never be the same again with astonishing bravery and determination, is both heart-wrenching and gut-punchingly admirable. Her body is, she says, is “frozen in neurological winter” and she still struggles to speak with consistent fluency.

The raw agony of her psychological and emotional battle to salvage her sense of self and find meaning in a life which was dominated by her love of music, both as a presenter and player, and is now achingly limited by her inability to feel anything down the right side of her body and therefore to play her beloved violin, is, at times, agonising to witness. As is her frustration and despair, at not being able to the mother she was and is desperate to be again, to her two young sons.

Burton-Hill’s oft-repeated mantra is “No acceptance, just defiance. I choose life” and it’s impossible not to want and hope for the best life possible for this heroically courageous young woman.

You can watch My Brain: After the Rupture on BBC iPlayer

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WHAT’S MADE ME HAPPY THIS WEEK

Wandering through Granary Square in uber-cool Kings Cross after a lovely lunch with dear friends, I came across this fabulous outdoor exhibition which I’ve subsequently discovered is called HighlightHer and which was created by multi-disciplinary artist, designer and former architect, Hanna Benihoud to celebrate International Women’s Day and “the quiet chaos and joy of ‘ordinary’ women’s daily lives”.

I’m sure you can understand from these pics of some of the displays why it brought me such joy (each display was double sided - with the illustration on one side and the words on the other)

Sadly the exhibition is only on until April 20th, so unless you can hot-foot it to Kings Cross before Sunday, you won’t be able to see it for yourself. But you can find out more about it, and super-talented Hanna HERE

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SMART SAVE TIP OF THE WEEK

I feel the need to preface this tip with the admission that I used it after one of the least successful cooking sessions I’ve had in a long time. Albeit for a reason that wasn’t entirely because of my culinary incompetence. Just mostly.

Every year at this time (Passover) I make fried fish cakes, using a ready made fish mix for the filling. This year, the shop where I always buy it didn’t have the brand I usually get, so I bought what they had and hoped it would be the pretty much the same.

My suspicions were alerted when I discovered that it was a very different consistency to the one I’ve used in the past, much more sticky and gloopy. But I persevered with the fiddly process of shaping the fishcakes, and coating them in egg and the special crumb mix I use.

Having discovered I didn’t have enough vegetable oil to do all the frying I needed, I reasoned I could probably bulk it up with olive oil (the only other sort I had in the house) and it wouldn’t make that much difference.

I’m sure those expert cooks amongst you won’t be remotely surprised to know that it absolutely did make a difference, or at least that’s the excuse I’m giving for the fact that I singularly failed to correctly judge the temperature of the oil and made it much too hot for the first batch of fishcakes I put in, which almost immediately burnt to a complete crisp on the outside.

I did complete a second batch at a more sensible temperature and left the pile of varyingly incinerated/fried finished cakes to cool down before trying one to see what the new mix tasted like.

I won’t beat around the bush here - they were disgusting. The mix was revolting and in the burnt ones, barely cooked. Even the supposedly properly cooked cakes were horrible. Truly they were only fit for the bin. And that, I’m sad and embarrassed to report, is exactly where they ended up.

The only saving grace in this whole sorry saga is that I used this tip to dispose of the cold remains of the mixed-up cooking oil and can, as a result, confirm that it works brilliantly (you bunch up the tinfoil tightly and throw it in the bin).

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FRIDAY FUNNY

In light of the above disaster, this did make me chuckle. Although not at the time it was happening.

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This is arriving in your in-box at the start of the long Easter weekend. I hope you enjoy the break however you spend it, especially if that involves consuming copious quantities of chocolate eggs.

My Easter treat was to spend a gloriously sunny day with my daughters and my gorgeous grandgirls, at a family fun farm where one of the many cleverly created child-friendly activities was a fabulously colourful Easter egg hunt. Spot the grandmother buried behind the gaggle of over-excited egg-gatherers.

Back next week, hopefully minus any culinary calamities. If you feel like dropping a little like heart, that would cheer my Easter up no end.

Thank you.