schnippets of chocolate, poetry + cloth

and a seasonally flavoured rant

I tried to post a small piece on instagram just now, to explain my lack of seasonal spirit this year. It must have offended the insta-gods because it was insta-censored and disappeared into thin air. I made the mistake of simply typing it in rather than composing elsewhere and pasting in a copy, so I cannot retrieve it verbatim, but it was more or less along the following lines.

I’m finding it hard to muster good cheer and send out breezy wishes for Merry whatevers this year. Everywhere in the world people (large numbers of them women) are being oppressed/slaughtered/raped/denied proper medical care and meanwhile people are casually celebrating the alleged birth of a “saviour of the world” whose heavily pregnant mother had to travel for days on a donkey before giving birth in a stable, and who had to see her son brutally nailed to a couple of pieces of dead tree and hung up to die thirty-three years later.¹

I know the legend is that the brutal murder of one man nearly two thousand years ago guaranteed the wiping clean of humanity’s sins so that all who believed in this were guaranteed a place in paradise, but I simply cannot get my head around the idea that this is a free pass to commit whatever sins you want, and still be able to slip past the door person at the pearly gates.

Even more appalling is that atrocities beyond the normal person’s imaginings are being perpetrated in what is commonly described as the ‘Holy’ land, where children just like Jesus of Nazareth (who I was taught at school was a Palestinian Jew) are being dismembered, shot and starved every day.

The ten rules for living (whatever name you want to give them) are much the same across the Abrahamic religions, just in different orders. Even if you only observe the key principles, it would make life so much better for everyone around you.

Be kind, don’t kill, don’t steal other people’s things or land, treat others as you’d like to be treated and be nice to your folks seem like useful guidelines.

If you have trouble understanding the modern version of the last commandment, often represented as “thou shalt not cove thy neighbours goods”, take a look at it in the form it is spelled out in Exodus.

“You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” It’s pretty clear, though decidedly patricentric.

I cannot make sense of the world leaders who publicly declare their allegiance to god and yet are happy to continue assisting the killing of men, women and children so that the people actually doing the killing can help themselves to lands and things that do not belong to them. Joe Biden’s hypocritical Christmas platitudes nearly tipped me over the brink.

So I haven’t sent out any cheery seasonal greetings.

Because I haven’t felt cheery at all.

But I do want to say how grateful I am for the support you lovely readers have shown me and my scribblings over the year, and express the hope that you will continue to hang about and drop in a comment when the spirit moves you. There’s a real sense of community here that I haven’t felt since those early enthusiastic blogging days.

I haven’t been a complete wet blanket though. My mokos enthusiastically decorated a tree, slathered sickly sweet icing on gingerbread, and exhausted by their labours devoured several dozen freshly baked pīragi² between them. My nephew and one of nieces (and her partner) joined us for a quiet Christmas Eve. The Polynesian Princesses had an excellent time and it dawned on me that my grandmother must have felt much the same way when I was a wee thing, and she was celebrating Christmas here in Australia but all the while deeply conscious that our family in Latvia was doing it tough under the Russian occupation, when (aside from having to queue for hours to purchase basic food supplies of very limited choice) Christmas was banned entirely, just like in C.S.Lewis’ book “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. As I child I was horrified that Christmas could be banned, but now as a non-religious adult and particularly as one uncomfortable with the idea of a stranger slipping down the chimney I wouldn’t mind if the annual orgy of overspending and overeating were cancelled.

I’m not against community jollity, but if it were up to me I’d simply be celebrating the solstice, the ancient feast observing the turning of the season which became absorbed by Christianity when that religion appropriated the date of Saturnalia and created Christmas. It’s an honouring of a natural phenomenon that offers followers of any creed an opportunity to gather together and share food and drink in community…and it happens TWICE a year!

Thank you for letting me rant. And I did hang some solar-powered twinklies.

And now to some schnippeting and a mixed range of unrelated, but with luck, interesting, subjects.

Firstly a big thank you to Charlotte Rains Dixon, who writes word strumpet and kindly recommended my substack as a suitable seasonal gift. I don’t think anyone has actually taken that idea up but the mere mention of the suggestion warmed my heart considerably!

BREATHING RUBBLE DUST :: Tracy Hudson

After I posted the text image below on instagram³ a little while ago, among the snarky messages I received telling me not to be so nasty and sarcastic was a kind one from Tracy Hudson, telling me that she had published a series of poems “for and from occupied lands” and kindly offering to send me some copies as we obviously share common ground. They arrived a few days ago and though sobering reading are beautifully composed. I will deliver one to the library at Fabrik, and will distribute the other spares. You can order your own copy via her website, click on her name (above) to be transported.

I mentioned chocolate in the heading, did I not?

In the event you may have received one of those trademark enormous mountain ranges whose bits even when broken don’t fit into your mouth and that threaten to crumble your teeth in the event you do actually try to bite them, I have a solution.

Break the mountain range into individual pieces. Spread out on a piece of baking parchment on a tray. (I wet the tray a little first so that the paper stays where I put it.) Stick the tray into an oven that is still hot from cooking something else.⁴ After a short while the mountains will become squishy.

Spread them across the paper using a palette knife, sprinkle your now-flattened chocolate cowpats with a little sea salt to counterbalance the extreme sweetness of this particular product and then put the tray somewhere cool, preferably away from the public gaze. Thin chocolate is much nicer to nibble on than thick lumps. So much so that when I went to take a picture of the finished product (which did not look at all attractive so you haven’t missed much) it had been hoovered up by passing snackers. Better on their hips than mine, though.

The mountainous chocolate comes wrapped in a useful substance. Sturdier than Lindt which was my favourite for making mordants…though I won’t be purchasing either brand in future, having established their warmongering connections. The Tony’s Chocolonely brand seems to be the most ethical of those available locally, so far as I can determine⁵, but who really knows? In the spirit of not wasting materials to hand, I’ve torn the foil into shreds and drowned it in vinegar. It will need brewing/resting for at least three months but will then be a useful pre-mordant for cottons. A tannin dip first, then when that’s cured for a week, a dip (or a spray with) the foil+vinegar solution. Don’t ask me to specify what colours to expect, though, because they’ll also be determined by the plants you select, the water you use, the treatment your cloth has enjoyed throughout its life (pre-used cellulose fibres are a lot of fun to play with) and the time you take to dye.

It’s been very hot here. So from time to time I’ve retreated to the armchair to visit cooler places, even if only virtually. Here’s one…

Some of my readers may remember the story I wrote about making a perfume on my last day in Morocco earlier in the year. On my return to Australia I put the flask away in a cool dark place so that it would enjoy at least six months to mature, planning to investigate it on my birthday. When I unpacked it from its cloth shroud and removed the lid, it smelled fabulous. Velvety and deep and dustily sweet. Rather as I had hoped…but when I sprayed it onto my skin one last factor came into play. That factor was me. It became clear within minutes that this blend, though lovely, was not dancing kindly with my body chemistry. A good reminder that no matter how delicious something smells in a bottle, you should always test it and give it time to tell you whether you can be friends. I wore it for a day and it became ever clearer that much as I loved the scent, it was not for me to wear. I had an inkling though, that it might very well suit a good friend of mine. Happily that inkling turned out to be spot on, and the perfume has gone to an appreciative home. It smells fabulous on my friend. I might not be able to wear it, but the experience of making it and the “lesson of suitability” that I was reminded of six months later were very much worth the investment (and are likely to pop up in my novel). If anyone knows where I can source a night-scented jessamine⁶ (the flower that inspired the blend) in Australia, do let me know. I will be more than content to simply sniff the wee blooms providing I can grow the plant here.

One of the most highly rotated garments in my wardrobe is the “westward shimmy” from the Maiwa Journeywoman collection. I had first invested in a version of it in 2018, dyed in indigo, and had asked Charllotte if we could include an dyeable iteration in the collection in 2020 because I had found mine so useful. I wear it under shirts (it’s quite long so is visible below a shirt hem) and sometimes over my tidewanderer dress (where it hides the pockets from view).

While visiting another clothing vendor in Jaipur on that journey (Charllotte knows all the good places to go) I had also purchased a simple cotton top with three-quarter sleeves and slits at the sides (very similar to the shimmy). Yes, it’s blotchy, but that’s what happens when you (a) don’t bother scouring (b) swirl your piece around in a weak vat. The dark blue shimmy, on the other hand, was dyed for Maiwa by their artisans and has hardly faded despite regular wear and occasional washing.

It came to me the other day that it would be practical to have a winter version of the shimmy, one that has raglan sleeves (which would be more comfortable than the sleeved one above :: it is quite snug and won’t fit over another garment).

So I began to play about with tissue paper and scissors in the hope of achieving a useful “crossbred”.