so said ellie: Remembers

The lure of home

10/07/2016 05:24:00 pm

At seventeen I was desperate to leave my small country hometown. With its population of 22,000 and shops that close on Sundays, I felt stifled. Someone always knows your business or asks about your mum’s knees.*

*Her knees are ok: she had her first replacement on Tuesday and is doing well. Thank you for asking. Yes, she'll be back in a couple of weeks, and the neighbours are looking after the dog. I'll let her know that you are happy to drop around for a cup of tea or drive her downtown.

On a Saturday it takes at least 30 minutes to walk 500 metres because you keep running into people that you know, and in 2003 there wasn’t a single café serving smashed avocado on sourdough. I knew that there was more waiting out there for me, although I wasn’t quite sure what.

As it turns out, the very thing that I was trying to escape from – other people, who know my entire life history – became the thing I longed for the most once I’d moved to Sydney. Gone was the comfort of knowing exactly where I was going, and the small pleasure of running into a friend in town with whom a quick wave hello becomes half an hour of surreptitious gossip.

The innate sense of familiarity, and knowledge of the best way to get home with maximum avoidance of stop signs and hill starts. Unfortunately there is no way to get anywhere in Armidale without going through approximately 800 roundabouts, but there are only 2 sets of traffic lights, so there’s that.

Yes, city friends, we do have an airport. In fact, Armidale is serviced by more than one airline these days!

There is a lure to small town life, although it took me a while to realise that Armidale is not like other small towns. It has a university, for a start, and now a preponderance of hipster cafes (although they don’t do all day breakfast, so what’s the point?!). The art gallery, the local beers, being able to drive from one side of town to the other in 15 minutes. And it’s just so beautiful.

Spring, with the cherry blossoms and wisteria starting to bloom, and clear blue skies; I want to take photos but there’s no point really because it’s something in the air, not just the trees. Autumn has the changing leaves, and even winter has a certain austere beauty on those grey days.

If you are unfamiliar with this part of the countryside, the sight of full dams and green, green grass will seem unexceptional to you. But to the rest of us, these things are worthy of many enthusiastic conversations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since arriving in the Middle East. I’m hoping that I will come to see that the desert has its own beauty. I’m not quite there yet.

The other day, landing in Sydney, my eyes welled with tears. Not actually because I was at home, but because there was grass between the runways, and it was so green. And then I cried because I was crying because there was grass at the airport. Emotions are running high at the moment.

Even though living Sydney made me miserable because of the traffic, and my long commute, the anonymity and facelessness of the city, I loved our neighbourhood; our wide leafy street and the Cooks River.

I hated our apartment, with its stucco roof, 4 flights of stairs, mouldering kitchen, terrible oven and slowly decaying bathroom, but sitting out on the balcony just looking up at the sky, I could forget all that and just listen to the wind in the trees. And also the neighbour threatening to kill someone, but even that had a certain charm.

Do you see that little speck at 1 o'clock? That's a Qantaslink Q400 with none other than Rob driving it. Ahh, even living under the flight path had positives.

I recognised some years ago now that my heart is in the country. I discovered a love of the outdoors and started to miss the cold winter air, smelling of wood smoke. Never mind that it gives you asthma… it gives me a sense of contentment.

This past weekend was a reunion of sorts with my group of high school friends, and even those of us who moved far and fast are starting to feel the pull of the small town life.

A friend who moved to Melbourne is looking to get out (although Armidale is currently off her list because it’s too cold); another has just bought a house here.

We all spread our branches far out into other places, but our roots are here and they run deep.

❤

Dubai life

For the love of bread

8/24/2016 02:56:00 pm

Fika. That precious Swedish custom. Both a thing and an action.

It is more than a coffee break; it may or may not involve coffee. It can be out, or at home, it doesn’t matter. But at its best it involves buns. Cinnamon buns and lots of them. Glorious kanelbullar - Swedes eat 316 of them per year. Each.

Sadly I don't have any pärlsocker on hand, so their little swirls are naked, but it's on my shopping list for when Rob goes to Stockholm next month.

Sandwiched between the labs at the Biomedical campus was a sanctum. A safe space where coffee could be drunk (so strong that it would pull your teeth out, and yet my Swedish friends insisted that it's the best coffee in the world) and chit chat could be had. Or silence. Companionable silence is also acceptable for fika.

On those winter days studying immunology, long on time and short on light, we would start class before the sun had risen and finish after it had set. In between hours spent bent under the laminar flow hood practicing cell culture with those stupid foot long pipettes that would always break, and afternoons of doing something methodical involving Bunsen burners (I can’t even remember what now), was actual scheduled time for fika. It is a social institution.

Not winter... but still, fika.

I don’t keep a diary, but I have been writing here for a long time. A cursory search returns at least 5 posts that mention, or are dedicated to fika. During the week of 18 November 2007 I had fika on Saturday at Storken (a café) and on Sunday at Kalmar (my nation, not a café). I rode a bike a lot then, so it was energy neutral to eat cake between 3 and 5 times per week. On May 22 2010 I wished for fika, and for the friends that went with it.

Not Sweden... but still, fika.

And yet, for so many reasons, I have not had fika for a long time. No space and no time. No community. An expanding waistline. You don’t eat bread when you are afraid of getting fatter.

Baking bread became part of our fika that year in Sweden. It was fun to try and decipher recipes written in Swedish, and while we waited for the dough to rise we sat in the kitchen talking about stupid things and important things, and sometimes about nothing at all. Breaking bread at the end was just part of the process. As was someone having to run down the hill to the supermarket halfway through to get more flour because we’d mucked up the measurements.

Needs more butter. Buttttaaaaaah!

We got so adventurous with baking - pretzels, bagels, focaccia. So much bread.

Right now my time is unlimited, and I have plenty of space. The oven works, most of the time, and doesn’t destroy every single thing I ever attempt to cook, resulting in a half raw half blackened mess (please don’t let this jinx it!!).

I loved that shirt. But oh, that kitchen. A kitchen shared between 12 people. Once someone left their plates in the sink for so long that they started to grow mould. I threw those plates in the bin and no one said a word.

Slowly we are building those connections that were missing in Sydney. Neighbours, friends, people to share it with. Fika.

Not kanelbullar... lussebullar. I'm excited about making these again, because saffron is cheap here, and you can't have lussebullar without enough saffron to turn the dough bright yellow.

And I have accepted that I love bread, in all its forms.

Yum.

❤ PS. If you want some kanelbullar as a result of reading this, try the ICA recipe. Mine is similar, but with more butter and less milk. Or go to Sweden. In fact, that's probably a better option.