Not very bleak midwinter

It will be hard to leave the Nilgiris, though leave them we must (tomorrow in fact). I can't imagine anywhere else where you could head up into the hills on Christmas night to an old wooden colonial house with braziers burning in the garden, a local music teacher singing Silent Night, a Father Christmas who wobbles his head sideways, and young men in light-up Santa hats providing tandoori cauliflower and 'handkerchief rotis' (so called because they are as thin as handkerchiefs). We drank local red wine with our hosts (a passable substitute for sloe gin) and went back for seconds and thirds (wontons, beetroot salad, fried rice, tandoori paneer...).

I am also now the proud owner of my first sari, a Christmas gift from our hosts. First of all I thought the top was too tight, but then it turned out I had it on back to front. The rest of it I couldn't hope to get on by myself, but help was at hand. I still don't think I would be able to go to the loo in it, but I will confess I did feel rather splendid, though it's a long time since I had my midriff on display... M got a kurta which also looks pretty amazing. The question is, where to wear them?

joella

The night before Christmas, Nilgiris-style

I came to the Nilgiri Hills a long time ago, when my Significant Ex and I were backpacking round India on a shoestring. I remember it rained, and everything felt grey, chilly and overpriced. I didn't really see the point of hill stations anyway (all those *hills*), and was happy to move on.

This time, I feel like I could live here. This is in no small part down to the wonderful hospitality of our host family, who have fed us royally, given us a cosy cottage to stay in with views of endless green hills, and taken us places we would never have found by ourselves. But it's also down to the sheer beauty of the place, the sparkly clean air, and the relaxed pace of lives lived largely in harmony, rather than competition, with the suroundings.

We've been walking through Shola forests and tea fields, and down winding roads past blue and pink villages with technicolour temples. There are little tea shops (and government liquor shops) and snack stalls, like everywhere, but there is also broadband and fully computerised banking. The cows are milked by hand, and the roads are mended (or not) by barefoot men and women balanced precariously on hillsides, but these same men and women have better mobile phone services and more TV channels than we do. It's a lot to get your head round.

Most everyone's a Hindu round here, but Christmas is celebrated too, in a slightly surreal kind of way. I'm looking forward to it.

joella

Chilling

This morning, I had to check my packet of malaria pills to find out what day of the week it was. Now that's what I call Being On Holiday.

We arrived at Misty Heights the day before yesterday, via an overnight train to Mettupalaiyam. Thank Krishna it was the last stop, as I couldn't undo the combination padlock with which I had chained our bags to the luggage rack. We could have ended up anywhere. But thankfully our hosts were waiting and sorted it out (how, I don't know), and we were off into the glorious Nilgiri Hills.

We're now at somewhere around 6600 feet. The air is thin, the stars are huge, and we are ourselves getting bigger by the hour thanks to three home cooked Indian meals a day. We've done a little walking through the tea buses and eucalyptus stands, a lot of sleeping, and M had purchased some shiny new Indian specs, having stomped on his two days before we left...

Our to do list is getting smaller, which was the plan, and I feel we are, you know, acclimatising. I even have an Indian mobile, which could text in Hindi if I wanted it to, and which reminds me when it's Kingfisher time (about now).

You don't need as much beer up here. I am sure there are myriad reasons for this.

joella

Rushed thoughts from Chennai Central

Whoah. It's different here. And largely great, though very very hectic. Good stuff: food (masala dosa!), drink (salty lime soda!), sense of humour, endless things to look at and think about. Bad stuff: traffic, squalour, and getting groped in the breast while walking down the street by a man who then apologised to M when I yelled at him. I was *incandescent*.

However, it appears the Indian male is beleaguered (sp?). I read in the newspaper yesterday about a story, which a, about how Indian men are, on the whole, too small in the trouser department for 'international' size condoms, which is having a detrimental effect on efforts to get more of them to use them. I can see why. The columnist writing about it added wryly that it was further galling to have as a related link on the page a story about how South African men have the opposite problem, as in they just can't get them big enough. It's bad enough losing to them at cricket, apparently.

There are also multiple posters pasted onto bus stops, hoardings etc advertising cures for 'sex problems', which are expressed in glorious euphemisms such as 'sleeping time sperms release' (actually there's nothing euphemistic about that, is there?)

So next time it happens I will shout 'Hey! Small Penis! Shortly sperms come out!' at him down the street. Even if he doesn't get it, I will feel better. And a very nice man gave up his seat on the rammed 17M bus for me, so it's swings and roundabouts.

We are about to get a sleeper train to Mettupalaiyam. There it will be calm and cool. Or that's the plan...

joella

Stress head

I thought I'd be packed and have my roots done in time to go see Tim & Jeremy's band tonight (sorry Jeremy). Instead I am STILL PACKING despite needing to get the airport bus in six hours, and the last thing to squeeze into the rucksack is the hair dye, as I will be doing it subcontinentally.

Check out the latest bizarre hand luggage arrangements. Who gets to make these things up?

Thankfully, housemate L is hanging around so we don't need to remove all perishables etc, but it's still been a hideous day. Next time I go away I will plan it for the middle of my menstrual cycle so I am not weeping and dropping things and swearing at myself. However I believe we are now packed.

So, in parting, here is my parsnip soup recipe (specially for C, who could use a little comfort...)

2 finely chopped onions
6-8 parsnips, whizzed in food processor or chopped v small
3-4 handfuls red lentils
garam masala
ginger
chilli powder
vegetable stock
olive oil
butter

Heat a knob of butter and 2-3 tablespons of olive oil in a heavy bottomed pan, add about a teaspoon of ground garam masala and half a teaspoon each of ground ginger and hot chilli powder, and sweat the onions until they're soft. Add stock (about a litre), parsnips and lentils and cook for 40 mins or so. Serve with sardines on toast.

Mmmm.

Right, next update, with luck, will be from Chennai. If I can't be arsed, merry Christmas!

joella

Reluctantly...two festive things

Sound is required for both of these...

1. Oxfam Unwrapped meets Mastercard on YouTube. I laughed at this despite myself.

2. Away - the Christmas single from Nonstop Tango on MySpace. Mawkish it ain't.

joella

In the gravy

(click image for a bigger version)

I've blogged before about the parallel universe of online grocery shopping, but until now those woah! moments have all been when they actually turn up on the doorstep with something almost, but not entirely, unlike the stuff you ordered.

Tonight, having reviewed the to do list for the next week, I thought the Tesco delivery charge would be justified and the random grocery risk worth taking. I also like the fact that, evil multinational though they may be, they take away all your carrier bags for recycling. (I feel oppressed by carrier bags - can't throw them away, can't burn them. I do have string bags, and a bike pannier, but still the plastic accumulates. I don't know where it comes from. But anyway.)

Now last time I went to India you couldn't buy tampons for love nor money, and while things may have changed in the last three years (can you *be* a superpower in waiting while still requiring women to use Big Pads?) I thought I should stock up. Hence search for Tampax, as I am fairly brand-loyal on this front, though I should point out that I would never buy a san-pro product with a name including the word 'Fresh', as that is clearly a euphemism for 'Includes chemicals that irritated the eyes of rabbits', and why would you stick those up yourself?

But also squarely on the list of things I would not stick up myself is 'Antony Worral Thompson Onion Gravy'. Some Tesco techie smoked too much weed before his algorithm class, maybe. Or maybe the Revolutionary Communists, who I seem to remember had an ideological objection to tampons back in the late 80s, are subverting the capitalist system from the inside.

Or maybe... what? M came down to top up his Shiraz, looked at the screen for a while, and said 'well, it's an easy mistake to make'.

It'll be interesting to see what they actually deliver.

joella

A drill of one's own

This lunchtime I was swaying gently to Moondance in front of the parsnip mountain in Tesco when I felt my mobile vibrating.

'What voltage is your DeWalt?' said Plumbing S. 'Er, 14.4', I replied. Why do you ask?

I'm in Toolmaster, she said, and they've got a Makita special offer on. The 18v is £20 more, do you think it's worth it?

Yeah why not, I said, specially if you get one of those special side handles. Don't forget your bits. What on earth, I wondered, is Plumbing S doing buying power tools on a Friday lunchtime?

The answer is, she's getting divorced. She appeared half an hour later with a large turquoise case, and spent the rest of the afternoon brandishing her new Makita round the office, making grown men cry. (Plumbing S has been described as NGO X's 'cross between Liz Hurley and Nigella Lawson'. She confounds expectations like nobody I have ever met.)

Last time I was this angry, she said, I put on an Alanis Morrisette tape. This time I decided to spend two hundred quid on a fucking hammer drill.

I salute her.

joella

From festive bus ticket to the whole five feet

Festive bus ticket
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

I was tempted to come over all bah humbug this year and only give house room to decorations made from used bus tickets and / or parsnip peelings. But then housemate L asked in a small voice if we had any tinsel or if she should go and buy her own and I caved pretty quickly and hauled the box of shiny things out of the loft.

Then she asked if I knew of anywhere within walking distance selling Christmas trees. Tell you what, I said, I'll pick one up when I go to buy some firewood.

And so it was that yesterday, being a lady of leisure on Tuesdays at the moment, I tootled off to Bagley Wood Sawmill.

I adore Bagley Wood Sawmill. It smells fresh and damp and woody, and rugged men in padded shirts and fingerless gloves appear to tip barrowfuls of logs into the back of your car and advise on axe wielding techniques. You glimpse a parallel universe where you live in a cabin with one of them, wearing padded shirts and fingerless gloves too, spending your days making tea over a roaring fire in a big cast iron kettle before striding with a wolfhound through ancient woodlands. Well I do, anyway.

Do you have any small-ish trees, I said. Well, that depends on what you call small, said the rugged woodsman. They're two pounds a foot.

We walked over to an enormous heap of trees and he pulled two out that were about five feet. Um, I'll have that one, I said, pointing. That was an easy decision, he said, most people take ages. Well, I said, to be fair, it's not for me. I'm going away for Christmas. Wish I was, he said. But the wife wouldn't hear of it.

I suddenly realised that he probably didn't live in a cabin in the woods. He probably lives in a semi in Abingdon. But never mind. We chatted a while longer about rampant consumerism.

Where do these trees come from? I asked him as I was writing out the cheque. Oh, we grow them just over there, he said.

I never knew that. Genuine Oxfordshire Christmas trees from sustainably managed woodland. That makes me feel a lot better.

joella

Making do and mending

My uncle J, who works for a fairy light company and recently presented me with some trade-show leftovers resembling a pair of giant sparkly bollocks, has never been that great at remembering birthdays. These days I don't give a stuff (I'm not that great at remembering them myself) but there was a time when this mattered. My mother therefore made sure he got me a proper 18th birthday present, which was my first rucksack.

It's hard to express how much I loved that rucksack. It lived in the same part of my heart as my 2cv, which arrived around the same time. They were symbols of my independence, and I made the most of them both. My rucksack accompanied me up and down the country and round the world, a little piece of home that I could lean on in strange places. It had a special smell, a combination of sweat and mosquito coils, special stains from damp railway station platforms, and a special pocket that I kept £20 in in case of emergencies, which was pilfered several times from cheap hotel rooms.

The bottom pocket was once ripped open somewhere between Perth and Bandar Seri Begawan -- probably an accident, as all that disappeared was a box of condoms -- but I managed to get the zip replaced in Kowloon. A few years later a bus driver in Oxford slammed the door on the belt buckle, and I managed to get that replaced too.

But eventually it was time to say goodbye -- it was a great rucksack in its day (a royal blue and red women's Berghaus), but it was a real bugger to pack, especially once the fabric between the upper and lower pockets went, and its straps had started to dig in. So I filled it with unwanted clothes and carried it on its last journey, down to my local Oxfam shop. I hope someone somewhere found a use for it.

This was about three years ago, just as I came into possession of my second rucksack, a Karrimor Global 50-70L. This rucksack, you can open all the way round and pack like a suitcase. Its straps are adjustable to fit your back exactly. It comes with a little daypack which you can zip onto the back or clip onto the straps and wear across your front. It has an extension so you can take it away full and come home with it fuller. And it has a special flap to zip away the big padded belt for going on planes, plus a shoulder strap so it can be carried holdall-style. I have hoiked it all over the place, from Amsterdam to the Zambezi. It's the business.

Or it was till, at barely three years old, the strap-zipping away zip went. I have been giving it hard stares ever since, wondering what to do with it. You can't really take it on a plane with the straps out, as they are the kind of straps which are designed to be zipped away. You'd have to get it wrapped up in one of those giant cling film machines they have at airports in countries where luggage is generally held together with string.

I know planes themselves are bad these days, so maybe this was a sign that I should just stop getting on them. Well, fair point, but wild horses wouldn't keep me in the country for Christmas this year with Glum McGlum and the Absentee Stepchildren. I'll plant some trees when I get back or something. And think of the methane I won't be emitting after eating all those sprouts.

So I had to get the rucksack situation sorted out. I don't have the cash for a new one, and chucking a whole expensive rucksack away for want of a zip feels badder than flying, even if it isn't.

Enter Lancashire Sports Repairs. What a lovely bunch of people. Cost me £36 (it's a big job, that, she said, and I am sure she was right) but it was done in a week and I had the pleasure of receiving a giant parcel in the post, which was very exciting even though I knew what was in it. I look forward to packing up my troubles in my old kitbag and smile, smile, smiling.

joella