"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.

To Fishguard

On May 14 my peregrinations took me to Fishguard, the  home of Jemima Nicholas, the eighteenth century female cobbler, said to be six feet tall. 

In 1797 French boats were seen to drop anchor near Fishguard.  Jemima rustled up a posse of women who, in their red cloaks and stove-pipe hats, are reputed to have frightened the French, who were intent on invading Britain. Later, the French soldiers surrendered to Lord Cawdor and the Castlemartin Yeomanry on nearby Goodwick sands.

I spent the sort of afternoon I enjoy, buying Pembrokeshire early potatoes, (£3 a kilo), and a tablecloth in a charity shop. Before going home, I had a pot of tea in 'Jane's' in the High Street. I resisted the cakes and decided to bake Nita's 'Lemon Meringue Pie' for tea. 

You will need:

Short crust pastry (enough to line a pie dish). 

2 lemons

2 eggs

2 tablespoons of sugar,

1 tin small tin condensed milk.

Line a pie dish with pastry (frozen is fine but remember to defrost it)

Bake it 'blind', which means lining the inside of the pastry with greaseproof paper and filling it with dried peas. Bake in a moderate oven for 20 minutes.

Remove from oven, discard greaseproof and save peas for next time .

Mix the tinned milk with the 2 egg yolks and the juice of the lemons.

Pour into piecrust. Whisk the egg whites and the sugar until stiff. 

Pile meringue on top and place the dish in a  cooler oven than previously. Bake for about 30 minutes. Careful it does not scorch- check frequently.

I love this recipe. Give it a try. That's all for today, Pobol Bach.