Showing posts with label London's East End. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London's East End. Show all posts

Monday 13 December 2021

Battenberg, Bats & Bright Romance

 I've always rather liked Battenberg cake, a peculiarly British confection made from alternating squares in pink and yellow, the whole surrounded by yellow marzipan. Heart attack on a plate? Perhaps, but like all treats it's a jolly splendid one, in moderation. 

Photo by Jennifer Pittam

From my writer's notebook I see that Battenberg cake was created for a royal wedding over a century ago, when the late Duke of Edinburgh's grandmother married Prince Louis of Battenberg. Apparently the sponge featured 9 panels at that time, but was simplified to four panels in the 1930s when bakeries began mass-production.

It's had a sudden resurgence in popularity of late, with stylish versions in pink and green, posh-looking slices in lemon and poppy seed and even a Blue Battenberg 'just because'. My own favourites are  the batty Halloween offerings, the more lurid the better. 

What a strange nation we are.

Glorious Halloween Battenberg by Sprinklebakes.com

I've a voracious appetite for reading. I read books on London history, baking, wildlife, oddities, peculiarities, health and spirituality of every kind. In our family the wide-ranging spirituality section of the bookshop has, for some inexplicable reason, been known simply as 'Shamanism' for years. When we enter a large bookshop and split up for our individual fave rave shelves, we've always agreed to 'meet you in Shamanism'. 

Photo by Jennifer Pittam

My mother was, famously, once propositioned by a ritual magician in 'Shamanism'.  He offered to take her, without benefit of either of their physical bodies, back to his seminar in South London, just to show that he could. She refused, apparently, not so much because she doubted she could do it (intrepid sort of woman, my mother), but because, she said, 'it would have meant 'going south of the river' which as a North Londoner, would have been quite out of the question.

Photo by Shutterstock.com

 In addition to non-fiction I devour fiction books. All types of fiction book. Not without discrimination, but without prejudice against any particular genre. This week the Sunday Times published its much-awaited 'Best Books of 2021, in every genre' list. Amazingly, it excluded the genre 'Romantic Fiction'. Apparently, in the year 2021 it's still acceptable to enjoy, even venerate, books that examine, depict and delight in murder or despair but not those that depict a love story. 

Photo by Jennifer Pittam

I just don't understand it. Milly Johnson sold 7000+ books in the week her genre was not featured at all by the Sunday Times, yet the British Heart Foundation has a 'Romance Stand' prominently displayed in every bookshop. The manager of my local shop told me: 'People like it - so it makes money. You have to know what sells when you run a charity shop.'

The fact is, best-sellers remain the financial backbone of the publishing industry. Learned dictionaries on Jazz Music do not bring in sufficiently large revenues, nor does the latest, beautifully written bildunsgroman - at least not on its own. I know this, having worked in publishing, and been a proud member of the editorial team on both. 

Well, in a few short days now the Winter Solstice will be with us and with that moment of stillness, celebrations of Yule, of Christmas and other winter festivals of choice. 


Photo by Jennifer Pittam

Wishing all of you the very best winter festival in these troubled times.

Count your age by friends, not years
Count your life by smiles, not tears

John Lennon 1940-1980


Fancy a little love story set in WWII? To download a copy of my best-selling Christmas tale, 'I Remember Very Well'  - set in London's East End - and a dozen other Christmas stories set in WWII, please go here 


(free on Amazon until 6 January 2022):






Monday 6 July 2015

Our Mother, Val Doonican & Omar Sharif



The Urge to Dignify Death

After a death comes a funeral, pretty much anywhere in the world.The urge to dignify the passing somehow means that we try to despatch the departed loved one with a ritual. In Victorian times, certainly in London, it  took as long as possible and 'death-bed' scenes were strung out with weeping and wailing. There were specific words, rituals and keepsakes known as 'memento mori'.

Unless you work in a funeral parlour or something, the language of death, arriving right slap in the  rawness of your grief, comes as an experience both surreal and funny.

The first thing that happens, in Britain at any rate, is that your family doctor certifies that the recently departed is actually dead, and there's nothing suspicious about it.

The Doctor's Jaunty Tie
In our case, the family doctor had been calling daily throughout the final week of my mother's life. The visit was strangely similar to the day before's, except that he arrived wearing a dark blue tie instead of his usual jaunty scarlet one.

Naturally, my sister and I wanted new outfits for the funeral. Even when you know someone's going to die, there's a reticence about going out to choose your special frock before the event. After our mother passed way, without thinking we arranged this ludicrous schedule, making sure that when we felt that urge to shop, one was always available to stay at home.

Feeling That Urge to Shop
 That's true grief, we discovered. It's not about how sad you feel or what a huge gap someone's left in your life. It's about the little things. Forgetting that you can now go shopping,


Much-Travelled Posy
That week I learned, too, about floral artistry, and the unique terminology that goes with it.  For example, you don't order a wreath but a funeral posy. If you order for a funeral on Dartmoor when you live in North London, Interflora doesn't actually drive 200 miles with said posy, they just charge you as if they had.

Another thing that made us fall about laughing was a Cockney superstition that my Nana, born and bred in London's 'East-End', taught us. If you hear of a death, then the next two people you hear of in the same predicament will go to Heaven with the first one.  So for example, our local butcher died this week and will now go to the abode of the angels arm-in-arm with the critic Brian Sewell and the much-loved writer of erotic fiction, Jackie Collins.

Clearly this sweet old fairy tale dates back to the time when London was a collection of small communities centred around the docks, the alleys etc. To Ma and me, it didn't matter a jot that there were millions of people in the world and hundreds of deaths per day. We still applied the theory, to gales of laughter, every time we heard of a death in the news or in our part of town.

So for what it's worth, my mother, who died on 2 July 2015, went to Heaven with Val Doonican and Omar Sharif. And boy, won't she remind us of that one next time we see her.

  Weep if you must,
Parting is hell.
But life goes on;
So sing as well.

Joyce Grenfell 
1910-1979