Bara Angylion Duw - God's Angels' Bread

Bread has a history at least thirty thousand years old. Unleavened bread, like flatbreads and pittas, contain no raising agent.  Pliny the Elder noted that the skimmed foam on beer, a result of the yeast used in the brewing process,  produced a lighter bread.  The yeast used for the fermentation process in beer is the same as the yeast used to make bread.

In the ruins of Pompeii, the poignant remains of bakers' shops can be seen.  It is the domestic details most of all that often highlight a tragedy.  

Yeast needs moisture, food and warmth to grow. A loaf of bread can be made from flour, water, salt, sugar, perhaps some butter. In the nineteenth century flour was often adulterated, with additions such as chalk.
Some bakers added sea-water to save on salt and customers complained.

Monks in the twelfth century Augustinian Priory in Haverfordwest ate their food off large slices of bread, using the bread as plates.  These were known as 'trenchers' and were meant to be distributed to the poor of the town, but often they were given to relatives or even stray dogs.

Cockleshells and Cakes

My favourite vintage tea-set - perfect for afternoon tea

I spent the afternoon on  Llansteffan beach yesterday afternoon, with my mother. Before going home, we sat outside the beach- front cafe, enjoying coffee and walnut cake, cups of tea and ice-cream.
Llansteffan is eight miles from Carmarthen and we holidayed here when I was a tot. That was during the 1940's, when there were donkey rides on the beach and cockling was a popular pastime.

I was reminded of a holiday, a few years ago, when I went to the beach at Marina del Cantone, a few miles from Sorrento, down a winding road.

It was a rough, windy day and we crossed the pebbles to the cafe that juts out to sea. There we ate almond and chocolate cake, watching the plumed waves crashing onto the beach.

I say all this now, because I have just come across a recipe called 'Gwbert Cakes', which are supposedly from the Ceredigion area. They are simple to make and I'll give you the recipe so you can fry them and try them.

(They are very similar to Welsh Cakes).

Delicious Welsh Cakes

Ingredients: 6 oz SR Flour,  2 oz sugar, 1 oz butter, 1 egg, a pinch of salt.

Method: Rub butter into flour, add remaining ingredients. Roll mixture out and cut into circles.   Fry in a little butter over a low flame. Sprinkle with sugar and hey presto!

"Sleep Furiously" by Gideon Koppel

I watched 'Sleep Furiously' and admired the way it cut across geographic boundaries. There was an elegance in the rhythm of what was recorded that appealed to me.





Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian 29 May 2009 says:  

"This delicate, tonally complex film by Gideon Koppel is a documentary love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. 

Between these melancholy tableaux, the visual palate is cleaned with single-colour panels, and with weird speeded-up sequences. One repeated image was a real madeleine for me: the sight of the mobile library trundling around the winding roads, a vital source of reading, thought, ideas ... everything. Trefeurig is full of people who love books. I couldn't help remembering the mobile library that used to appear in the village of my own childhood (Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire): a purple bus, shaped like an elongated tallboy wardrobe on wheels, which, Tardis-like, had a miraculous stock of books, far more than appeared possible from the outside. It gave you the feeling, when you effortfully climbed the big steps to get in and stood in its narrow aisle between the two great walls of books, that its centre of gravity was that little bit too high and that the whole vehicle would topple over if it took a corner at anything over 15 mph - and might well do so at rest, if you moved around inside too quickly."

I hope you like what you find here, and may be you'll tell me exactly how you found this piece, in the comments section.

My Novel Salt Blue

Thought I'd drop by to tell you copies of my novel 'Salt Blue' are selling well on Amazon.com!  I'm really delighted by this news received today via email.

There are still copies left - reduced for a short period of time only.

Hwyl, Gill

The Blue of the Night

                                     The Blue of the Night

                                She said it was the time she loved the best,
                                The hour when day caresses night
                                In deepest shades of blue,
                                When stars shine in the darkest light
                                And earth takes on an azure hue.

                               Golden Byzantium and Rose Red Petra,
                               Your body guilds my lips, my words
                               Shimmering shadows across the sands
                               Of time, whispering softly
                               In the twilight you called 'L'heure bleu'.

                              Ages have passed, I think, or so it seems
                              And I have tasted lips carved cold.
                              Now longer shadows blot the light
                              In the dusk I call 'The Blues of the Night'.

Metonymy

                            Metonymy

                  She was a stolen woman
                  But he chose her,
                  Mixed his pigments with her
                  Shadowed brightness.
                  Opalescence,
                  Light condensing on leaves.


                  He captured her image,
                  Dipped his paintbrushes in
                  Rinsed raindrops,
                  Verbascum, bugloss.
                  Made her his own,
                  Birdsong
                  At dusk and
                  Each evening.

                  Water marks paper,
                  Like pain revisited
                  From a safe place.
                  Experience can explain
                  But only poetry translate
                  The perfume of rosa rugosa,
                  Still in the air.

Majorcan Mice

Pollensa, in the north of Majorca, is one of my favourite holiday places. 
The light has a chromatic quality, giving it a clarity that attracts artists to the area and writers, too.

One day, we took the train to Soller, a small town with lovely old houses where orange merchants lived years ago.

I did not know at the time, but Alan Sillitoe, the author, rented a house there in the 1950's. 
It was 1963 when I read his book 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'.  I was expecting my first daughter and I had borrowed the novel from the Fishguard Library.

The book impressed me,  describing situations  clearly and simply.  Before this, I had been reading Thomas Hardy but  'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' was different.

Sillitoe's style struck me as a completely new way of writing, not that I had much experience of reading novels at that age, but I realised it was something special.

Alan Sillitoe lived in Soller for a number of years, surviving on a small disability pension from the forces. One night, on returning from the local taverna, he found the kitchen was swarming with mice, which he had to sweep out through the door.

I am given to sudden flights of fancy and remarked to my husband that it must be lovely to live in Soller.
He thought about it before remarking that the winters can be bitterly cold there, hence the mice invasion, probably.

Let's just say I'd like to spend the summer months there, then, with something of Alan Sillitoe's to read.