The Green Tomato Saga continues and concludes.  This Sunday I cleaned my room which means I looked through my jewellery and thought - ‘surely I used to have more earrings than this?’ or ‘what happened to that ring from [insert rather posh gallery here – back in the days when I could afford such things]?’  and then when youngest was out on a fag break, having a quick squizz at possible places where, had she taken them, I might find them – you know, rolled under the bed, chucked in a bowl with three clips and a used cotton bud, at the bottom of a pencil jar.  I didn’t find anything, and so did the only thing I could.  Mentally kissed them goodbye, shrugged, and thought – ah well, who cares?  I assembled what I could find, cleaned my silver bangles, realised I have more dark glasses than any woman reasonably should, vacuumed the carpet, carried all my clothes into the little boxroom I use as a wardrobe, dropped them in a pile the size of the Matterhorn for a later sift and sort, and changed the sheets.  Bedroom -  cleaned.  Box room – not so much.

I then turned my attention to the garden.  The apple tree had yielded its crop, much of it to the ground, where the ants, mice and squirrels were enjoying the harvest.  The rest was sitting on the kitchen table like it had been styled for Country Living – the orchards edition, awaiting the pot.  In it went in two huge batches – one for pie filling and ice cream making, and the other for membrillo.  This year I decided to make basil apple membrillo but after the pot had spat at me for an hour and the damn stuff still wasn’t jelling – it takes two or three - I gave up.  I’ll freeze it for now and perhaps resume it later, with the clothes sifting...  Next, with the last of the green tomatoes and the fountains of basil, I made green tomato pasta sauce and – I have to say myself since nobody else tasted it – it is delicious, frozen into its neat little boxes:  Green Tomato Sauce, Apple Pie Filling, Apple and Mint Syrup, Apple and Grenadine Granita and Apple Ginger and Basil ice cream - I now survey the freezer with the satisfaction of a pioneer woman looking at her root cellar.  I couldn’t have been happier if I’d bought that orange Prada bag at last week’s antique textile fair.  I mean, I don’t need another handbag that one of my kids will purloin.  There’s just something so emotionally pleasing about cooking something you’ve grown yourself and putting it ‘up’ to enjoy later.  Well, there is as long as it’s a now and again hobby and not a chore you have to do in order not to starve.

The next task is to pick all the herbs and dry them with massive amounts of Basil puree.  But first it’s New York, and the ‘Brazilian Carnival’ birthday party for which I bought an amazing Morticia Adams vintage dress which, when I modeled it for the youngest, drew the comment:  ‘ohmygod, you look like a ho’.  I couldn’t get it off fast enough and am now looking for an alternative.  ‘But I meant it in a good way,’ she said when she realised I wasn’t going to wear it.

Is there a good way to look like a whore, I wonder?

After the party, I'll report back.  Leaving as a virgin, upper class (certainly not a whore when I fly, darling) on Thursday...

In the meantime, the v. last picture of tomatoes.  Thank god I don't have to get through a harsh winter on the Prairie on this meagre crop...  Though it was a v. large basket

Photographs from a Failed Gardener

the one single Yellow Brandywine Tomato that ripened	One of only three Green Zebras
But the Blue Spice Basil flourished	and yet, I still don't know how you can grow ruddy olives in a North Kensington Garden and fail to get ripe tomatoes?
Cupboard Love nothing to do with anything but it's cute

So let’s talk tomatoes

Six different ruddy varieties:  green zebra, green finger, pink lady, black pineapple, yellow brandywine, and bog-standard plum – all coaxed from seed to sprouting plant – except for the plum which were given to me by my some time to be father-in-law.  I’ve been tending them like babies all summer, trussing them in the greenhouse (especially bought for the purpose of tomato propagation) and placing others in choice spots around the garden where the sun can bathe them (when it deigns to shine), and the rain can feed them, when it bursts – as it has had a tendency to do – from the heavens.  

And this is what they look like:

I can’t tell one from the other, except for the stunted green fingers which I didn’t like the sound of from the beginning.  No chance of them ripening now this late in the season.  I feel chutney coming on.

Life is full of disappointments, but the fact that the only ones that ripened are the plum tomatoes, and that they taste like economy Tesco's - ie 95 percent water, is one of them.

I promised myself I would never post photographs of my cat.
I lied.

Every time I see France in my stats I wonder - is it you?

September 11th.  Someone mentioned it today in the office and until then I hadn't actually noticed the day, or remembered the significance.  Eleven years ago.  It's our 'Kennedy' moment, though I am old enough - vaguely - to remember Kennedy's assassination.  More ingrained in my memory is my 'Churchill' moment since it was the one time I remember my father slapping me after I complained about not being able to do something which had been cancelled because of his funeral.  Nobody slapped me in 1963.

Eleven years ago everything was different.  My children were all still in school, the youngest 9, my eldest 17, head girl at her poncy private school and about to enter her final year there. I was a restaurant critic for the Financial Times.

One thing, however, was the same.  I was fat.  I'd just come back from Weight Watchers.

I was fretting about an email I'd seen on my husband's computer in which he had arranged to have 'a drink' with a 'friend' in a London hotel.  The etiquette of snooping.  How do you confront someone about something you are not supposed to have seen?  You don't.  You just seethe quietly, and worry, and fight alternating panic and sorrow like you're standing in a tennis court having balls shot at you by one of those automatic machines, swatting one emotion out of the way in time to deter the next.

The scales were not kind to me when I weighed in, but they were harder even on my friend Maria and we came back clutching our little ration books ready to embrace the rosary of calorie counting.  I dropped her off and walked into the house.  It was a beautiful day.  Sun was streaming through our rarely washed sitting room windows, which gave the room a wonderful golden glow of diffused light.  My husband met me at the door.

Did you hear?  He asked.

Hear what?  I wondered, my first thought turning guiltily - me the guilty one - to his forthcoming assignation that evening at 5pm.

The World Trade Centre.  Someone has flown a plane into it.

The TV was his witness and tuned to the footage of, what we did not then know was only the first, plane going in to the tower, over and over again.

Oh my God, was it us?  Please say it wasn't us!  I'll never forgive you if it was us?  I gasped, rushing to the sofa where I crumpled like one of the imminently collapsing towers.

Al-Qaeda, he said instantly.  The Palestinians couldn't manage anything as carefully planned as this.  It has to be Bin Laden.

There was an instant wash of relief that the kids wouldn't be vilified, the phone wouldn't be tapped, the shame wouldn't taint us, followed by horror as the second plane hit.

Everything after that is a communal experience.  I think most of us watched the towers fall, over and over and over and over and over again as if, by chance, just once they might wobble and remain erect.  And we all waited like the empty hospitals for the survivors who didn't come.  And some of the shame settled on our shoulders anyway since we had Arab surnames.  Palestinian or Saudi was a nuance lost in the Spot a Man of Middle Eastern Appearance witch-hunt that only subsided somewhat after Asians blew up the trains a year later, and turned attention back to a minority many had long been waiting for a reason to target.

Funny that the first thing I remember though is the house.  The sunlight.  The welcome of walking into a warm, bright, home - and my husband meeting me at the door as he had done a hundred, a thousand, times.  The nostalgia for that moment, when everything was still intact and I was still the mother of four kids who would come home in the evening with muddy football kid, and overflowing schoolbags, and lunch boxes; who would change into their pyjamas and sit with us on the sofa and eat cereal at the wrong time.  It's like a huge tsunami of pleasure.

It was only when I probed further that I remembered the woman at the hotel bar that my husband was going to meet and buy, with his customary generosity, several expensive cocktails, and - well who knows what else.  I'll never know.  The one good thing about the twin towers coming down is that he didn't go.  He cancelled.  I presume.

But not before I needled him in the car later that day and he smacked me in the face.  It was the one and only time - and provoked as it was by my unspoken knowledge and his unspoken guilt, it stung all the harder.

I think I preferred the Kennedy assassination, all things considered.

This time last week I was zooming up the M3, my car loaded with festival must-haves and picnic must-haves and beach must-haves, as well as weekend-in-cosy-hotel must haves, but - damn it, also realised must-have-forgot my phone.  Suddenly, I felt naked.  No link with the ever-chattering, ever-clamouring, eaver-eager not to get in touch with me, outside world.  Just me, ten-thousand or so strangers in funny headgear and not enough clothes, Bf and an empty space in the palm of my hand.  No buttons to press, to tweets to tweet, no pictures to post on facebook of me wearing my son's kaffiyah, my Christmas 'festival' socks, my daughter's wellies from when she was 11, and my other son's boy shorts from when he was 13.  Some would say this was a blessing.  But I was like a junkie without my fix, a smoker missing that ever present packet of fags cupped in the hand, an alcoholic without the drink.  Though I did manage a few of those.  Drinks, I mean.  Deffo no fags.

So we stood in mud  - Wellies  √
We stood in rain - Waterproof Coat √
We sat on mud - Waterproof Blanket √
We sat on chairs in mud - Folding Chairs √
We stood in the beating sun - Hats and Sunglasses and Sunscreen √
We read (okay some of us read and other stood inside tents that smelled of death and cattle) - Books √
We availed ourselves of the 'facilities' - Wetwipes, Antiseptic handwash √
We walked - Stout trainers √
We swam - Bikini √
We picnic-ed - Picnic rucksack complete with chopping board and salt shaker √
We huddled in car from cold - Large faux fur rug √

We also listened to some great music, a list of bands that went into double figures, many of whom we'd already seen in London on many and diverse occasions all gathered together in tents like a big Festival mixed tape of all your favourites.  We listened to Patti Smith.  We ate a great deal of healthy flatulent vegetarian food.  We subsequently did a lot of walking.  Apart.

We stayed in a chocolate box pub, in a chocolate box village, and took a chocolate box stroll across Constable fields with clumps of dear White Galloway calves that I know, due to their lack of udders, have only one fate and it isn't a life of a stud, poor things, and watched the swallows swoop and dive with a sunset backdrop that makes you stop and stare and gasp upwards at the pink and violet strata.  Then we returned to our soft, downy duvet where after a steamy shower and drank big glasses of red wine in bed, careful not to spill any on the sheets, and slept the sleep of the just-back from the festival mud.

I don't really understand, though, why it is that sleeping in a tent for a few days (the strange lives of others) and listening to music, standing up, with a beer in your hand from 11am onwards necessitates a special wardrobe of tutus, and voile head-dresses trimmed with fake flowers, and teeny short- shorts or large 50s style frocks of the sort that obese women wear on sea-side posters - and those are just the men.  We were very staid.  Bf bought a new hat.  I held my breath when he stuck a big, tatty stetson on his head.  OMG, I sighed, when I could eventually get enough air in to expel the words.  If only you had a tartan shirt.  And a BIG belt.  With a buckle.

I'd look like a cowboy, he said.

Oh, but I do like a cowboy, I replied woosily.

So do I, piped up a guy, wearing a tutu, holding a pint of beer in his hand, with a flat cap sprouting Indian feathers.

Damn him, that was the end of the hat and all my cowboy fantasies - corralled..

He bought a little Castro cap instead.  Quite fetching.  I'm getting him the matching khaki fatigues this weekend.