Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Hard Dunk - a love that never fades

Thinking back recently upon my travels to England when I was very young, one recollection arises unbidden and repeatedly.  In fact, I have never truly stopped remembering it, with desire tinged richly with regret.  Of all the good things, it’s the one I’ve missed most consistently; amid the bad things, it always softened the blows.  There’s not much to be said about it, but the articulation of those meager memories reifies them for me - helps cement their sweetness in the shifting matrix of memory.  Sure, they’re just cookies, but these are cookies I’ve craved for forty years - and a forty-year craving is worth a few lines of blogscrawl, I should think.

The England of my recollection from 1970 was a place of ludicrously rich foods.  Milk came in bottles the top quarter of which was pure cream that would stick to my spoon as I ate my cereal; chocolate was tangibly thick with fat.  The ice creams were a disappointment texturally, but were plenty sweet enough if not too much so.  The national punch, “squash," was sold in a concentrated form that was hallucinogenically sugary.  And while cookies, per se, did not exist, the range of baked goods available in their stead more than made up for that deficit: hot scones drowning in butter, cakes and tarts of every description, gateaux and jellies and puddings unlike anything I’d ever tasted - and, of course, the ubiquitous, if seemingly inaccurately-named, “biscuits.”

I was used to thinking of biscuits as the crumbly love-child of a cracker and a dinner roll, typically served with gravy and certainly not dessert fare.  Not so in England, though.  An English biscuit could go from bland to overwhelmingly glucose-laden, covering a wide range of the flat baked confection genre.  Big’uns, li’l’uns, thick’uns and thin - “biscuit” was a generously inclusive term for one of my very favorite kinds of food. 

In the panoply of biscuit-dom, I found much to admire and many to recommend - but one stood out so far above the rest that my longing for them persists to the present day.  What I recall of them may be gilded by the artistry of memory, but, if so, not much.  There just wasn’t that much to remember, and I’ve held onto it so devotedly. 

The biscuits of my beloved memory were dunking biscuits, though I can’t vouch that that was their actual name.  They were square, about two inches to a side, and baked to a rich dark color.  Significantly, they were hard.  Damn hard.  The other noteworthy quality possessed by these biscuits was that the top was heavily glazed with brightly colored images of simple familiar things - a tree, a house, a tiny car - simplistic to the point of being juvenile, but crisply rendered in bright colors made entirely of thick, plaster-like sugar.  This, in combination with the high tensile strength of the biscuit itself, made for a confection of unrivaled rigidity.  They were designed to be softened up by being dipped in milk or tea; eaten out of the cardboard carton, it took all my youthful masticatory vigor to work through one, and I actually recall having sore jaws after enjoying two of them dry in quick succession. 

After we returned to L.A. at the end of that trip, we occasionally did some shopping at English specialty stores - the sorts of places that sold crumpet mix, mushy peas, and Bird’s custard.  I always looked for the dunking biscuits at such shops but I never did find them.  When we returned to the fair and pleasant land six years later, I arrived with high hopes of renewing my acquaintance with the hard biscuits, but no dice again.  And since then I’ve checked at any number of brit boutiques and limeytoriums - all to no avail.  Even on-line searches - which officially turn up everything - have proven unsuccessful.  My beloved dunking biscuits seem to have utterly flown the coop. 

The longer I look for them, the more I want them.  So you can take this as a whining rant, a cry for help, or what you will.  Just so long as one of you tells me how to get some of those damn biscuits again.  Otherwise, what is the internet even for, anyway?

Coming up when I get around to it: rusty truck and dinky mountains!  You can’t afford to miss it!  Don’t make my site tracker hunt your sorry ass down!  because that’s an extra charge and I don’t think I’ve subscribed for that part of the service, you know.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Reliving the Magic: More Weekend Photos cuz there was More Weekend

Okay suckers, you got the first chapter of Weekend Recap - Phototastic Version yesterday - but you knew that was just a warm-up.  The weirdness would get weirder.  The cuteness would get cutesier.  And Proud Mary would keep on burning. Just as soon as I got a chance to upload a few more photos.  Which is happening even as I type these barely coherent words.  So let’s get started with the photoblogification of the weekend just past: 

We’ll start with something simple and straightforward: Zachary at his soccer class.  Jesse, too, seems to enjoy these outings, and it’s all we can do to keep him from stomping his irrepressible way out onto the practice pitch.  I’ll show you what I mean, but, those of you with cuteaphobia: AVERT YOUR EYES!

Later that Saturday, after a whirlwind session of housecleaning and forty-wink-taking, we hied our butts hence to the east bay for to see some visiting relatives and some relatives who actually live hereabouts but we all too rarely see.  For purposes of pure edification and character development, then, please to enjoy: the Blattner meet-up!

Let’s skip ahead to the next morning.  We arose early enough to enjoy a mouthful of gen-u-wine San Fran fog, drove across the Big Orange Bridge,

and headed up to Sonoma and the hallowed open-air halls of TrainTown - one-fifth the size of Disneyland and possessed of what they claim to be the most fully-developed scale steam train in the Americas.  And do NOT forget, that includes Guyana AND Uruguay.  DUDE.  That is one damn well developed scale steamer, and you can keep the Cleveland.  We rode the train,

visited the old western mockup village,

and even hit the dragon-coaster with Zach - twice. 

(Kel is the one in the white hat… yeah, this one’s sort of more documentary than ottistic, but it’s my blog and you’re gonna get that sometimes.  Suck it up.) Airhockey was played.  A carousel was rid.  Corndogs were consumed.  A game of Ms PacMan was ignominiously lost.  (Did you check your coat pockets?) “The Spirit of New Orleans” was repeatedly listened-to over omnipresent loudspeakers.  And, perhaps most importantly, coupler knuckles were clearly identified:

As the sun crept over the yardarm, or whatever it is that trainfolk use to tell them it’s getting to be the afternoon, we took our leave of TrainTown and drove the rented Hyundai back down towards Frisco City.  However, since we’d spent so much time entertaining the kids, Kel and I insisted on one side trip for our own gratification, to Cline Winery.  We figured the kids, or the one of them who was still awake, anyway, would enjoy the ponds while we tasted a dozen or so tiny mouthfuls of delicious, delicious deliciousness.  As it turns out, the ponds were even more fascinating to him than we’d anticipated.

And what, exactly was he watching so carefully?  Ooh, the weirdness returns… Let’s zoom in real tight for a HIGH-DEF CARPTASTIC FREAKOUT!

Plus, they have a real-to-goodness bath house there - not like the ones here in town here where you arrive clean and go home so dirty your priest would slap you, but the kind where you arrive filthy with trail dust and creosote, and get just a tiny smidge less filthy by immersing your wretched self into murky but enclosed waters.  That’s how they did it in 1877, anyway.  And at Cline they’ve got the wall-carvings to prove it. 

After that, we drove right back home, where the kids woke up the moment we put the car in “park.” Then they watched television and threw toys all about the house till we finally got them to go back to sleep again well into the evening.  And that, my beloved lurkers, was enough of a weekend for me. 

Ah, you caught me, didn’t you.  You know we just had to replace our car because of a NOT OUR FAULT accident - so why am I driving a *rented* Hyundai?  Well, it’s a funny story… Kel was driving the boys and me to Jesse’s day care, so I could drop him off and she could continue to Z’s preschool where she does the drop-off for him.  Yeah, it’s a little complicated, but the point is, we were all four of us in the car at 7:45 in the a. freaking m., when, as we drove through an intersection where cross-traffic was controlled by a two-way stop sign, for god’s sake, someone decided she could sneak across in front of us and wound up ramming our front left wheel with her diesel Mercedes.  Upshot: our car’s in the shop for two weeks and I am seeing a chiropractor.  Hence the rental Hyundai.  And the throbbing discomfort.  Good thing the kids are unhurt and still very cute… and that life is still weird enough to distract me.... next up, eventually, more regular wordosity, probably.  But I’ve got a site visit tomorrow that takes me next door to the world’s smallest mountain range, so let’s see if I get any inspiration up in Sutter County, shall we?

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Weekend Photorama #1: Fairyland, Already

Surely you’ve had enough of my words for the time being, however short a time that may be, after that last post.  By way of giving you a break from the blather, here’s some photos from the past two weekends.  I warn you: some of it gets pretty cute.  But rest easy, the rest of it is full-on weird.  It’s a nice balance, really.  Not unlike my own life. 

SO: Two weekends ago was the trip to Children’s Fairyland, the little amusement park that inspired one “Walt Disney” to put the Brothers Grimm on steroids.  It’s about ten acres on the shore of Oakland’s Lake Merrit, and is based on the concept of small settings with buildings and sometimes sculpted figures, that replicate some of the more beloved fairy tales and mythical children’s stories.  Many cultures are covered but the anglo-germanic traditions are most prominently featured.  It’s very low-tech, low-impact, aimed at the youngest of the ambulatory children, and fascinatingly untainted by generally commercial imagery.  We visited with the Paiges, and had a delightful time, as to which, the following are a pale reminder:

They have an “Alice in Wonderland” area with strange tunnels and murals and slides, ultimately debouching into the kind of maze that adults seem to find more disturbing than the kids do:

And who doesn’t know that old poem about how there was a crooked man, who walked yadda yadda yadda?  Sure, we all loved that one.  But can you still even like it anymore when you realize that this is that crooked man?

Just inside the entrance, which is loaded with crazylooking “Aladdin and the Freaky Genie” imagery, is this little watchtower.  There’s no ride or story attached to it; it’s just sort of Di Chirico in real life.  Even in the daylight, it seems impossible and possibly unreal:

One of the many little rest pavilions scattered around the park had hand-painted benches with variously figurative scenes on them.  This one caught my eye, as a very wry reworking of Edward Hopper’s classic “Nighthawks at the Diner.” Kids probably wouldn’t get this one, but some parents do…

This was so weird that I felt I had to double up on it.  Outside the little Fairyland Chapel is a set of figures designed to replicate - not a fairy tale this time, but a Christmas pageant.  I admit readily to utter inexperience with such pagentry, but is this really what they are supposed to look like?

This one claimed to have something to do with a whale, but I didn’t recognize the name of the story.  I did recognize that a similar item appears at Disneyland, much larger and rather more frightening.  This one is just weird, and that’s the way I like it:

You may have noticed that the kids are not featured in these photos.  I’m just not posting those ones because the cuteness factor is sort of excessive, but here’s a nice shot of D, K and J lining up for a glare-off:

After several hours at F-land we retired to the Paige home for cocktails and wheeled toys.  Here is the heart-catching beauty of our four kids playing together as the sun slides down over Berkeley:

Finally, just to show you how damn magical the whole thing was, here’s a little plaque that’s stuck to the back fence at the Paige house.  I guess I always wanted to get a nice shot of it, and here it is:

Okay, that’s actually enough for now.  I’ll come back later in the week with the Soccer, TrainTown, and Winery shots.  Till then, practice patience.  Or I’ll send that crooked dude after you.