The Future is Female

I have lived a life that is dominated by women in many ways. Art history is largely female in my experience, and out of a department of about sixty people, there were two, maybe three men - the tiny minority, by a wide margin. I went to an all-girls’ high school, where male teachers were rare, and any jobs that needed doing (sports teams, science fairs, provincial exams, the yearly musical, art shows, fundraising, Spirit Week, holiday parties and concerts, volunteering, letter-writing campaigns, you name it) were planned, organised, populated, advertised, and carried out by women and girls. Math and science were not ‘male’ subjects: all the classes everyone took were, of course, counted as ‘girly’ subjects because we were girls, and we were taking them, so… you know.

People sometimes assume that girls, when grouped together, become catty and aggressive with each other. I don’t remember that being the defining feature of my social life at school at all. Instead, I recall a kind of shedding - not a pleasant image, but suitable, I think - a shedding of the expectation, the demand, to be pretty. It’s a rent that women are expected to pay for the privilege to exist in public, but for at least five days a week for six years of my life, that rent was forgiven. In seventh grade, the earliest a girl could start at this school, we earnestly tried to do our hair and look cute in our terrible uniforms, and eigth grade inevitably brough on a wave of kilt rolling to ensure the shortest possible skirt (and a roll of fabric around one’s middle), but from then on, there was a distinct drop off in fussing over looks. Perfectly coiffed waves? Absolutely not - we opted for ponytails, braids, or broccoli-shaped buns twisted at the very top of the head, caring little for loose strands - anything to keep your hair out of your face. We also generally ditched daily makeup of any kind - mostly, the logic seemed to be that an extra few minutes of sleep each morning was vastly more valuable than a face full of foundation. At a certain point, we all seemed to accept that there was no way to look cute in the uniform, so we gave that up, too. A girl in a knee- or calf-length skirt was either in seventh grade, because her kilt was new and not yet hemmed, or in twelfth grade, because she wasn’t trying to show off her legs anymore, and didn’t care.

Instead of hyperfocusing on looks, I remember an air of earnestness. It was generally a good thing to be at the top of the class, and my classmates became invested in school projects, classroom discussions, and studying for tough exams. Participation was cool - or, perhaps more accurately, participation was fun, and we didn’t care so much about being cool. We wept openly when we watched Little Women in class, and there was no retaliation, no teasing, no shame in it. Now, it wasn’t a utopia: did every girl get along with every other girl? No, of course not. Was everyone good at everything? Obviously not. A good friend of mine was a ferocious volleyball player, and I was terrible at sports and gym class. But there wasn’t a feeling that somehow her upcoming match was more or less exciting than my weekly choir practice - especially considering she was in choir with me. The clique-y, rigid expectations for teens that tend to show up in John Hughes movies just didn’t seem that important in my experience.

I put that down to the lack of boys. There was no one to impress, so we got on with other stuff that seemed a lot more important - like what class costume we could come up with for Halloween, or how to get away with wearing sweatpants under our skirts without detention. As we learned in this week’s episode, yes, single-sex education was developed out of a biological misapprehension about women’s bodies, but the outcomes were great, at least for me. There are apparently studies that show that single-sex education is wonderful for girls, but terrible for boys, and the reason seems to be that when left without their usual targets (women), boys turn on each other. The reaction from some quarters to this news is that we ought not to have single-sex education, to protect boys and young men from violence and bullying, so that women can assume that burden, keeping the boys safe? Cool. I’m more inclined to wonder if we shouldn’t convince boys to stop targeting anyone at all, but hey, what do I know? All I can tell you is that I have enjoyed a distinctly female life, learning, working, studying, and growing alongside women who are funny, ferocious, smart, driven, kind, empathetic, loving, and more.

Jennifer

All Grown Up

I don’t know about you, dear listener, but one of the major parts of my shift from childhood to adulthood was makeup. As a little kid, I loathed face paint with the fire of a thousand suns. It dried tight and itchy on my skin, which I could not bear. I was the only child at the Christmas concert who happily wore the little paper antlers but rejected the red thumbprint of face paint on my nose to complete my Rudolph costume for our performance of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” I maintain that the show was not drastically altered by my bare, paint-free face, and really, there is only one Rudolph - a whole chorus of tiny four-year-old Rudolphs would have made for quite a different song.

This approach to makeup changed as the products improved and I got older. As a ten-year-old, I had one strawberry and one root beer scented lip balm, with little keychains attached to the lids so I could dangle them from my knapsack every day at school. The strawberry one added no colour at all to a person’s face, but the root beer one was dark, and very slightly tinted your mouth. The result was probably more “I just ate a popsicle” than “sophisticated wash of lip colour”, but my ten-year-old self was satisfied by the product at the time. I’m not sure they actually did anything to address dry lips, but they smelled so good, and all the other little girls in my grade had one, too. It felt nice to be included and compare notes about our favourite scents, and admit to one another that we were often tempted to eat them because of their delicious and startlingly realistic scents.

I was in dance classes as a kid, too, and that was where I had my first introduction to actual makeup - although, of course, stage makeup is quite different (thank goodness) to the sort of stuff you’d wear on a normal day. This look comprised thick, pancake foundation, quite a bit too orange for my skin, paired with ferocious red lipstick, slashes of vibrant rouge, extending into my hairline, and worst of all, black eyeline and mascara - which, because I was young, was usually applied by someone’s mother, who held my forehead in a vice grip and normally stabbed me in the eye with the kohl. Not a pleasant experience. Even more difficult was getting all the gunk off after the fact. Stage makeup is like concrete - thick, flamboyant concrete. I miss dancing, but I do not miss the makeup.

I dabbled in a more manageable look as a teenager, but never really developed a consistent habit of wearing it. For school dances, I started wearing sparkly eyeshadow, frosted lip gloss, and aggressively applied winged eyeliner (the early 2000s were a challenging time). I read magazines with my friends, poring over pictures and how-to guides in those heady, distant days before the internet and video platforms filled with cheerful makeup tutorials, demanding that girls use about sixty products to achieve an acceptable face (each one accompanied by a heart-stopping price tag, too). I did not have dozens of makeup brushes or loads of products. Instead, I got my glittery eyeshadow from the drugstore and applied it with my fingers or one of those horribly useless little triangles of foam glued to a plastic stick, which came along with the makeup. The results were awkward and amateur, but then again, just about everyone I knew was working with the same tools, so we all looked roughly the same level of bizarre. There were some strange products and trends, typical of their time, which I am delighted to have left behind: putting foundation or concealer on your lips, for instance, which resulted in a sort of ‘kissed by correction fluid’ look, or the insistence that any inch of visible skin be covered in shimmer.

I will say that my heart aches a little for girls today. I would have dissolved, I’m sure, in the face of the pressure to live up to social media models and YouTube tutorials, demanding that young teens do their best to look airbrushed and colour-corrected and flawless all the time. My makeup was bad, but maybe that was good? Maybe it was okay that, as a literal child, I hadn’t perfected the accoutrements of adulthood? I’m sure the generation before me probably had similar thoughts about new products and changes to making up when I was a teenager. I’m sort of both grateful that mousse-textured foundation and eyeliner pencils you lit with a lighter to melt the wax are behind us. On the other hand, that time of life was exciting: we were in a big hurry to grow up and thrive, and makeup seemed like one of the ways to do that. But you know what they say, nostalgia’s not what it used to be. And, thankfully, neither is the makeup.

Jennifer

Telephone

As I sit at my desk, setting about to write today’s blog, I can feel the weight of my cell phone in my pocket. Where do any of us go without our phones these days? But they’ve obviously become more than just the simple devices that let us talk to our long-distance relatives or best friends or mothers or the bank. Now they’re entertainment, miniature computers, games, cameras, televisions, radios, GPS devices, watches, calculators, and perhaps worst of all, distractions, all rolled into one. I routinely find myself scrolling, or worse, doom-scrolling these days, trying to numb out the negative feelings that seem to crowd around me, face illuminated by the blue light of my screen, waiting for me to grow tired of swiping through content on a never-ending dopamine dive, waiting for me to put the phone down so they can come crashing back in again. Like the nightlight in my bathroom keeps away Gary Oldman Dracula, who lives in my shower, my little phone keeps away the goblins that live in my brain. At least, for a little while.

But other goblins come out to play whenever my phone is in my hand. Boredom, exhaustion, dry eyes and bad posture, and a rollercoaster of anticipation: the joy doesn’t come from watching that cute cat video or reading that insightful poem: it comes as we swipe our thumbs up the screen, eager for the next thing, the next piece of ‘content’ (hateful word), hoping against hope that the next one will be the one to make us feel better. And then the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Somehow hours can pass by, and eventually this rollercoaster flatlines. If I’m perfectly honest with myself, the phone doesn’t make the bad feelings go away and leave space for good ones. It numbs everything, a sort of mental Lidocaine, turning down the volume on the noise and chatter in my mind.

And yet to put down this little hunk of plastic and metal feels nigh-on impossible. To give up a cell phone now seems like the same commitment an anchoress of old would make. Medieval women, ususally nuns or sisters, would offer to be walled up in a church or cathedral, sometimes an abbey, sort of a very intense version of hermitage, living out the remainder of their days with no contact, no interaction with the outside world -nothing. Usually, they would go quite mad and have visions of Christ and write metaphysical poetry. Without my phone, I couldn’t call my parents, or speak regularly with my friends, or get around my city easily, or know what the weather would be, or check my email, or listen to podcasts, or - and perhaps most pressingly - numb out the terrible feelings that sometimes follow me around. To be all alone with myself and my own thoughts, bricked up in a wall somewhere, sounds like a sort of torture. And yet an anchoress chose her fate willingly. Maybe I ought to put the phone down and walk away - perhaps poetry and visions of salvation wait for me on the other side of scrolling. Maybe that’s where enlightenment and fulfillment lie.

Ah, my phone has buzzed. I should really check my email. And a few minutes scrolling never hurt anyone…

Jennifer

The Seaside

I am, at my heart, a Prairie girl - moutains are all very well in post cards, but in reality I find any sort of incline the cause of a spoiled landscape. So disorganised, so irregular. Driving in the mountains is hazardous, and walking uphill is uncomfortable. I know it’s an insupportable opinion to hold, but I cleave to it still - the earth may not be flat, but I sure do like a flat horizon and a BIG sky, one that comes in startling colours (minty green before a storm, painfully deep blue in the height of summer, jewel-toned and glowing at sunset, pale gold in the morning, velvety black and dotted with diamonds at midnight, periwinkle when it rains - increasingly, hazy orange when fires rage in the north).

But I will admit that this certainty was challenged when I first saw the Atlantic in person. I was standing on the pier at Dún Laoghaire, having gone past the pebble beach and the ornate pergola, right to the very farthest outreach of the pier’s stretched arm, to get as close to the ocean as I could. How strange to stand on the shore and know that home was on the other side of that briny sea, but only able to see wave upon wave, dark and foreboding, but strangely seductive, too. Even stranger was the place where the ocean met the land: Dún Laoghaire was tidy, charming, quaint, with pretty treed streets and inviting little lanes and quite a nice church and the most aggressively friendly people I’d ever encountered, anywhere. There were swanky hotels and cozy little inns standing shoulder to shoulder along the cobbled streets, with bright facades, like heavily made-up faces, or stately Victorian shops in ruddy brick. All very civilised. And then right next to all this civilisation was the wild water of the Atlantic - churning and hurling itself against that pebbled beach and the walls of the pier. I wondered if the people of Dún Laoghaire had purposefully leaned into the rigid charm of the town, in an effort to put from their minds the wildness of the ocean that beat against their shore daily. Either way, it was a remarkable sight, and for the first time I began to have an inkling about sailors of old who longed to go to sea, despite its dangers.

The more staid aspects of this little seaside town were very pleasant, too, to give them their dues. It was very soothing to stroll up and down the pier, eating a 99 (soft serve with a chocolate stuck in it) to the dulcet tones of seagulls and the crash of waves. I stayed in a funny little bed and breakfast, full of twisted stairwells and mismatched furniture, where the proprietress made me an Irish breakfast and insisted that I eat it with so much vigour that I could hardly refuse, despite my day of travel ahead. I wondered, then, too, if that aggressive friendliness which seemed to greet me wherever I went in Ireland, was typical of island nations for whom the sea’s aggression was never distant - although, on second thought, the English are similarly insular, in both senses of that word, - and they were, in my experience, much less likely to offer to help with my luggage or holler ‘what’s the story?’ at me as I got on a bus. I hope to go back to Ireland soon - perhaps to find out more about those fiercely friendly folks, but also to reacquaint myself with the Atlantic again.

Jennifer

You’ve Got Mail

Autumn is not quite upon us yet, dear reader, but I am finding myself thinking increasingly of that best (and shortest) of seasons. Spring is cheerful, summer is lazy and languid, winter starts out invigorating and then slowly melts to a sodden, dirty grey puddle, but autumn - oh, autumn is beautiful and perfect from start to finish. The air gets crisp and tangy, even before it properly cools down, and the riot of colour from the finery of the trees never ceases to surprise and delight me. There are satisfying thunderstorms that rinse the heat and stickiness of summer away, leaving cool breezes and puddles pooling on the asphalt. At its commencement, autumn is for reaping summer’s bounty: ripe stone fruit and corn-on-the-cob, apple picking and more zucchini than you can shake a stick at. This is followed by what I now think of as ‘stationery season.’ I am no longer in school, but the urge to stock up on fresh pencils and pristine notebooks - as Anne would say, ‘with no mistakes in them’ - hits me like a freight train. Then it deepens into rusts and golds and brilliant oranges, ideal for cider and anything made with pumpkin, for cozy sweaters and chunky socks. In turn, autumn grows spooky and shivery: rustling leaves, encroaching dark, and the Witching Hour! And finally, autumn lays its head on a pillow, turns over, and falls asleep, giving way to winter, having had it’s last colourful hurrah. I know the New Year technically happens in January, but after literal decades of school, it’s hard not to think of the end of summer (the Sunday of the year, I always think), as the Old Year bowing out, and autumn as the New Year stepping in to take its place.

All of this charming and cozy fall goodness must needs be accompanied by another autumnal ritual, at least in my house: autumn movies. For whatever reason, there are a handful of films that not only take place in the fall, but seem to fairly sing of the season. I tend to think of them as ‘golden’ movies, or ‘oboe movies’ - because their colour palettes tend to feature autumnal colours so much, and their soundtracks accent the oboe, what we might consider the musical equivalent of a goose - very autumnal. Fly Away Home, Rudy, Sweet Home Alabama, Sleepless in Seattle, Practical Magic, Little Women, Dead Poet’s Society, When Harry Met Sally, and yes, You’ve Got Mail. While different in many ways, the characters in these films have one thing in common: they all seem to have enviable knitwear. These aren’t perfect films, but they are the movies that seem to align best with this time of year, so I dutifully make a cup of tea, put out some fresh baking, cocoon myself in a blanket, and watch them nearly every weekend from September to the end of November. You’ve Got Mail begins its plot in autumn - more specifically, autumn in New York - and when Meg Ryan waxes poetic about bouquets of sharpened pencils, it’s hard not to get nostalgic and yes, perhaps a little weepy about them with her.

The letters of this week’s episode, and the ‘oboe movies’ that I’ll be watching soon, both speak to nostalgia, the yearly pause that autumn brings, the beginnings of new journeys, and the deaths of the old. Perhaps Maya Angelou put it best in her poem, Preacher, Don’t Send Me:

I'd call a place
pure paradise
where families are loyal
and strangers are nice,
where the music is jazz
and the season is fall.
Promise me that
or nothing at all.

Jennifer

Testing, Testing

By the time I reached my first class in university, I was quite familiar - too familiar, in fact - with exams. But a new adversary was waiting for me in ARTH 1200 - the first-year course, a requisite for the following four years of art history classes. That was the slide test. In a darkened room, with a slide projector facing a screen, we were barraged with images, sometimes dozens of them, and asked to identify the image, its maker, its material, date, and two or three points of significance. This was rounded off with a few images paired together to prompt the essay portion of the test. We did these a handful of times per semester, the worst cases being when the tests were cumulative, and we had to keep the prehistoric cave paintings firmly in mind even as we juggled early Renaissance painters.

Some of these tests felt fair, reasonable, even. Even those cumulative tests in the first year felt doable, because it’s fairly straightforward to differentiate an Archaic Greek kouros sculpture from a Golden Age Islamic mosque in Cordoba. Were there moments when I forgot who painted The Raft of the Medusa and stared, unblinkingly, eye twitching, at the projected image, willing it with all my being to give up the answer? Yes, of course. It’s Gericault, by the way. But, generally speaking, slide tests in the first year were okay.

When I got to upper-level classes that were more specific, things got trickier. There is an in-between period in an art history degree where you have moved beyond the general, buffet-style first-year course wherein you cover dozens of cultures and several millennia in a term. Still, you have not yet made it to the research-and-paper-heavy fourth-year classes, where endless essays replace slide tests. These were the years of ARTH 1320 (Medieval Art) and ARTH 1450 (Chinese Landscape Painting) and, perhaps most difficult of all, CLAS 1340 and 1350. You’ll notice that those course codes are not in the Art History department, but in Classics - a new field, and one to which I did not have an immediate attachment. I like textiles, and those are pretty thin on the ground in the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of chitons and togas, we studied kylix after kylix, amphora after amphora. Were they distinguishable? Barely, and only by the figures painted on their surfaces. To make matters worse, the professor of CLAS 1340 (Greek Art), a man with an impressive moustache and a complete disdain for students, did not provide us with the slides to study. Instead, we were expected to memorize the images after a single viewing during class time. I hastily scribbled little sketches of each piece of art alongside my notes, hoping against hope that I would remember that the kantharos decorated with Hercules fighting the Nemean lion was from the 3rd century BC, while the kantharos painted with Hercules fighting the Lernean hydra was from the 2nd century BC—maddening stuff. The following section was Roman Art (CLAS 1350), taught by a different professor who was a bit more forgiving but completely obsessed with slipper lamps. Not a class went by that we did not spend some time, usually, quite a long time, talking about slipper lamps. They are small, palm-sized oil lamps made of clay and resemble a slipper, with one pointed end and one rounded end. I remember very little from the rest of that class.

I have now been on the other side of this equation, as it were, teaching first and second-year courses to students who similarly do not relish slide tests. I have tried to be a bit kinder to them, offering them the slides to study from beyond class hours, and avoiding tricksy questions such as those in my ARTH 1420 course (Byzantine Art), where I had to differentiate the Church of St. Demetrius in Vladimir patronised by Tzar Dimitri, or the Church of St. Vladimir in Dimitri patronised by Tsar Vladimir, who was Tzar Dimitri’s eldest son. I jest, but only just. And I offer them the same mnemonics I developed to survive these tests, such as the parts of a cruciform cathedral set to the tune of “Head and Shoulders” or to memorise the artworks in order so they know that Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait definitely comes before Sonia Delauney’s Rythme (1556 and 1938, respectively). I will admit that, while marking is not generally a joyful experience, sometimes the desperate attempts at answers or go-for-broke responses become highlights in the drudgery of grading. I will also confess that I am not totally convinced that slide tests (and exams more generally) are the best tools for adjudicating a student’s work or progress, but here we are. To all those art history students who are in the process of plowing through their own slide tests, I can only promise that this too shall pass - slide tests will eventually become a nostalgic experience about which you will wax poetic, as I have just done.

Jennifer

Night Light

Nighttime is just about the most comfortable part of my day. Partially, that is because the heat and humidity tend to drop - a bit - so while the daytime feels like living in a pot of hot soup, things become marginally more pleasant and bearable once the sun is down. I can go outside for a walk, or leave the window open and enjoy the delicious breaths of perfumed wind that drift in, bringing the scent of daylilies with them. Things become quieter, too. I turn the fans off at night, so the constant whir of their blades and motors stops only when day has ended. I’m sure you can tell by now, dear reader, that summer is not my favourite season, and the kind of humidity one finds out East is still foreign to me - and I to it.

I have lived all my life in cities. Two big ones, and one medium one, and for a brief time, a tiny one, really more of a town, which just squeaked past the population requirements, pushing it toward city status. In all cases, I have been used to the soundtrack that usually accompanies such places, especially at night. The thrum of cars, the indistinct murmur of people talking, of neighbours walking overhead and dogs barking in backyards. This is my normal. But every once in a while, especially in summer, I long for a different kind of night music.

‘The Lake’ is a kind of catch-all term that people from the Prairies use to describe leaving the city. “I’m going to the lake” could mean there is an actual body of water at said destination, or it could mean roughing it in a campground with a tent, or it could mean a carpeted summer home with a dishwasher and a flat screen television. In my childhood, ‘the lake’ meant a cottage facing out over a dark, root beer brown lake in the White Shell (the lake was quite safe, just full of tannins). The cottage had non-potable water, mismatched furniture, and black bears, so our trash had to be driven to a special garbage site and locked in a caged dumpster. There was a green canoe, an orange paddle boat, and a dock with a rickety ladder so you could inch your way into the freezing water, one rung at a time. The living room of this cottage is burned in my memory, very likely because of a pair of taxidermied ducks on one wall, and a similarly stuffed goose over the television set, which did not get a signal but could play the three or four VHS tapes on offer. I watched Muppet Treasure Island on repeat until my parents were close to mutiny themselves.

Daytime at ‘the lake’ was full of swimming and cavorting around in the woods and devouring watermelon and swimming some more and taking one of the boats out to see the litle island in the middle of the lake, and reading on the dock and throwing dried peas to the flock of geese that visited and hanging towels to dry on the porch and banging the screen door and using my father’s binoculars to spot otters and muskrat and practicing somersaults in the lake and hunting for sliders and playing in the reeds and losing a shoe in the mud and listening for mice in the boathouse and running everywhere. There was too much to do and only so much daylight.

Night was a different matter. I was not keen on the dark at home, in my streetlight-lit suburb, but at the lake, the blackness that settled over everything wasn’t just the dark - it was The Dark. I would lie awake sometimes, trying to see anything, my eyes wide and staring into nothing, but there was no light to be had. Going to the bathroom or getting a cup of water was a terrifying prospect to a pre-teen with an overactive imagination. And when there is no light, no visual data to be had, one becomes very aware of sounds. There were birds who sang themselves to sleep as the sun dropped, and sometimes a loon would let out a crazed, heartbroken whoop in the night, but mostly nighttime brought a symphony of insects. There were crickets (very pleasant) and cicadas (horrible), and worst of all, the solitary mosquito, with its squealing, maddening hum, searching for a late-night snack in the dark - and I was the snack. Of course, the minute you turned on a light, the droning would stop. Was there a more satisfactory, glorious moment, though, when you did finally slam a hand down on said mosquito, and your room would go blissfully, beautifully quiet?

I had a little battery-operated toy lantern, which I used as a nightlight. It was green plastic and shaped like an old-fashioned hurricane lantern, with a handle on top and a flat, circular base. It threw a wan pool of light in my otherwise pitch-black room, casting shadows on the walls and keeping the monsters in my mind at bay. They say you can never go back, which is true, but, oh, dear reader, what I wouldn’t give for the deep, untroubled sleep of a ten-year-old who had played herself to exhaustion, watched Muppet Treasure Island until her eyelids grew heavy, and then drifted into dreams in the darkest, quietest, most peaceful room on earth, her nightlight burning faithfully beside her.

Jennifer

Going to the Ex

There is one Exhibition in my hometown every summer, although it is not a replica of the Great Exhibition: it’s more of a temporary theme park, with rides, games, fried food, and cheap plastic trinkets. I’m not wild about rollercoasters, so I’ve never been the Ex. My preference definitely swings towards events that are more specific to the Prairies and Midwest: agricultural fairs. These usually contain some combination of horse shows and cattle competitions, prizes for the biggest pumpkin or best rooster, festivals dedicated to corn and apples, sheep shearing, tractor pulls, and, charmingly, children’s pig wrangling. You can find a startling array of jams and preserves, wood carvings, quilts, ceramics, and other useful knick-knacks at these events, complementing the livestock and poultry.

Preparation for a fair of this kind is key. You will be on your feet all day, so comfortable shoes are a must. But there will also be every domesticated animal known to North America, so it’s best to skip your brightest white sneakers, and closed-toed shoes are preferable. It will be blisteringly hot, so a big hat and light clothes are a good bet. Do not try to look like a farmer or a cowboy - the real ones will be able to spot you a mile away, and frankly, so will everyone else. Be ready to drink lots of water and reapply sunscreen like it’s going out of style.

You will start with the horses. They will be surprising - you are very likely to see horses bigger than you thought it possible for horses to be. Seventeen, eighteen hands high, with hooves like dinner plates and backs you cannot see over. These are the gentle giants, the plough and draft horses, descendants of the muscle on farms of old. They are intimidating to look at, but usually quite sweet in nature. The ones you want to watch for are the ponies. Small, barrel-bellied little hellions, with wild eyes and nasty tempers, Shetlands are especially moody. As a general rule, I avoid them entirely. In all cases, regardless of size, their barns will smell pleasantly of sweet hay and manure, of homemade fly spray and hoof oil. This is a divine perfume, exclusive to such events.

There will be cows next. These will be the cleanest cows you’ve ever seen. They will be, like the draft horses, astonishing in size, and positively glowing. They will chew their cud placidly as an energetic teenager curries their backs with aggressive swipes. The calves, weaners, and stirks will be curious and inclined to explore everything with nuzzling noses and tongues. Like human toddlers, they explore the world by putting things in their mouths.

If there are sheep, they will be the most delightful of all the livestock. Their lambs will stick close by, tails wagging at startling speed, especially when feeding. The sheep, too, will be cleaner than any you’re likely to encounter, but that might be hard to spot at first. Generally, they are decked out in blankets or fly sheets, little sheep-shaped outfits that cover them, nose to tail, to protect them from flies and keep their gleaming fleeces clean in their stalls. Most of these sheets go over the sheep’s head, with eye and ear holes cut out. They tend to have a sort of Sheep from Space look about them, like little sheepy astronauts, which is very possibly the most charming thing you’ll see all day.

You will admire chickens and roosters with unusual plumage, especially those with feathery feet. You’ll exclaim over the excitement of sheepdog trials and the excruciating sweetness of little pink piglets, nosing in straw and staring up at you through impossibly long lashes. There will be dog and cat shows, and the usual solo llama farm represented by some very bad-tempered llamas, alongside the enthusiastic knitter who raises them for their wool. She - and it is always nearly ‘she’ - will be more than happy to show you how a spinning wheel works, and sell you a skein or two of her finest alpaca. Very often, the creature who produced the wool in question will be made known to you on the label, so you can say ‘thank you’ to Betsy, Pumpernickel, or Steve for their gift.

A word on food: the choices on offer may make you quite giddy. Turkey legs, roasted and eaten like a medieval lord; huge sandwiches, impossible to eat with dignity; funnel cakes and ice cream, melting down your chin; cotton candy, sticky and sickly sweet, in unnatural colours; and gallons of lemonade, with significant pucker power. Tread with caution - fair food is one area in life where less is more.

When you have seen every possible stall and show, filled your arms with jars of pickles and jellies and wildflower honey and your mind with memories, it will be time to pack up and go home, to say goodbye to the fair until next year. I can promise you the best sleep of your life after a day in the sun, and a newfound appreciation for the smell of manure. I’ll meet you there next summer.

Jennifer

Camelot

You know the Richard Burton - Julie Andrews musical, Camelot? It details that age-old story of Guinivere and Arthur and Lancelot, with jaunty show tunes and frankly stunning costuming, and an excellent original soundtrack album. I was reminded of it this past weekend, when I attended my first Medieval and Fantasy Fair.
Let me set the scene. It was hotter than Hades, the steamy, sticky heat that is a specialty in Quebec. I wore an enormous sun hat and only the lightest linen clothes, and still felt sure that I would melt by the end of the day. Happily, there was much to distract me from the sweaty, pressing weather. Immediately upon arrival, we were delighted to encounter a handful of ponies and some quite nice dappled grey horses, munching hay in their paddock. The pony’s mane and tail had been very skillfully dyed in a rainbow - the reason for this would become clear later. There was live music and dancing, demonstrations of archery and swordplay, a court jester festooned with bells, stilt walkers, face painting, and purveyors of a startlingly wide range of goods for purchase.
There was also an ongoing display of 17th-century French warfare tactics, which meant that for much of the day, live cannons and muskets fired with little warning, and smelled strongly of sulphur. There were people dressed as pirates, as dragons, as mermaids, as Orcs and other mythical creatures from Tolkien, with more rubber elf ears and flower crowns than you could shake a stick at. During the literal horse and pony show (wherein some pretty high-level dressage was taking place), the tie-dyed pony in question had been decked out with a sparkly horn to make him into a minuscule unicorn, albeit with the characteristic barrel belly so many Shetlands have. He was charming and delighted the small princes, knights, fairies and dragon hunters in the crowd. Frankly, I was delighted by him too.
Now, some of you may be thinking, ‘well, none of that fits the Medieval category’, and you’d be right, dear reader. You’ll notice that the organisers of this event very cleverly tacked “and Fantasy” onto their medieval fair, so that any and all could ostensibly fit in. However, this link between fantasy and the medieval world reminded me of this week’s episode. For some reason - possibly the Victorians, perhaps the Camelot musical, or some other, unknown connection - people seem very ready to associate the medieval period and its loosely understood aesthetics with the worlds of fantastical beings, heroic deeds, and fair damsels. As we saw in this week’s episode, the medieval period wasn’t actually all that full of damsels in distress, and the closest we come to fantastic beasts are in the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. Perhaps because the era is so distant, so very far away from our own, it lacks the sharp detail in our imaginations that more recent periods possess, and so we are happy to fill in the blanks with whatever suits our fancy.
And it isn’t just modern folks, like the ones I met at the Medieval and Fantasy Fair. Remember Camelot, the musical? The whole thing ends with Richard Burton plaintively asking that we, the audience, remember that the magic and mystery, the pleasantness and inevitable tragedy of Camelot, existed—a place where it never rained or snowed out of season, where love blossomed as a matter of course, a place of shining glory. But of course, whether in the Thomas Malory stories or the musical, Camelot is itself a fantasy, too. Maybe, after all is said and done, that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a help, not a hindrance, to have a fantastical place to escape to on the weekends, to let our fancy run wild, and if we choose to call that place Camelot, then so much the better.

Jennifer

Bad Hair Day

I have never had a hair dye fiasco, very possibly because I read Anne of Green Gables as a little girl and was duly warned off trying to mess with Mother Nature too much. I have absolutely had bad hair days. The fringe I had in elementary school, which I did not know how to wrangle successfully, probably did not help matters. But, before elementary school, before I read Anne of Green Gables, there was a very bad, no-good, awful hair day.

On weekends, I woke up very early and played in my room, or sometimes went downstairs to watch cartoons. My parents would have coffee in bed while I entertained myself, usually setting up melodramas with my stuffed animals. So it was one fateful Saturday morning. As my mother tells it, she and my father were enjoying their coffee, half-listening to me talk to my toys in my room. And then, alarmingly, my running commentary faded into silence. As anyone with children will tell you, silence may be golden, but it is not your friend. And then, according to my mother’s memory, a little voice pierced this worrying silence.
"Uh oh.”
My parents flew from their room to mine, coffee long forgotten, and stared down in horror at my handiwork. I had gotten my pudgy little hands on a pair of craft scissors and gone to town on my bangs. As a three-year-old (and until about the age of ten or eleven), I had a straight, fine fringe, usually split by an untameable widow’s peak. But that morning, evidently displeased by my unruly hair, I had slowly and methodically cut my bangs - off. There was a tiny stiff line of what was left of my bangs sticking straight up from my hairline, and the rest lay on the floor.

My poor mother. There was no chance of saving my fringe - there wasn’t really any fringe left to save. She whisked away the scissors, explained very carefully that we do not cut our own hair, and did her level best to cover my shameful hairline with a headband. The headband situation would become my reality for about four months while my mirco-micro-micro bangs grew back out again.

Since then, I have had bad hairstyles - does anyone else remember the sidebangs of the 2000s, or the crispy frying sounds of a wet-to-straight flat iron on damp hair? - but have never attempted another DIY haircut. I learned that lesson the hard way. I do still have a store of emergency headbands - just in case. What I do not have, and may never have, is enough apologies to my long-suffering parents. Sorry, Mum.

Jennifer

Painted Wings and Diamond Rings

You know, dear reader, diamond rings might be well and good, but when I was writing the script for this week’s episode, I was first reminded about rather a different kind of jewellery. I had a small, choice collection of dress-up gear as a kid - a sparkly tutu skirt my mother made, decked with gold sequins, a glittery fairy wand and crown, and costume jewellery. There was a strand of plastic orange star beads, and a set of multicoloured wooden beads that, to my childish mind, smacked of Cleopatra’s finery. These paired very well, in my estimation, with the stick-on earrings someone had given me, that came by the dozens on a sheet of paper, and which did not stay on especially well. These trinkets ornamented my queenly garb (an old dressing gown) or marked me out as an all-powerful witch (a black cape) or adorned my stage outfit for those times that I was a ballerina-singer-musician-superstar. I might have gazed in awe at my mother’s real jewellery box, but the objects in it were not for playing with. So, at least to pre-school Jennifer, the plastic stuff was more valuable, because it was more useable, and because it was mine.

Later (say, around twelve) I was allowed to walk the blocks to the local convenience store or corner gas station, and buy a bag of pick-and-mix or a syrupy slushie, and I can still recall the thrill of getting a ring pop to enjoy, feet dangling from the bleachers near the baseball diamond in the school grounds nearby, full of sugar and the kinds of eager, unmitigated excitement girls have when they are twelve, before it’s been squashed out of them. Someone knew how to make a dandelion crown, and there were inevitable trades and gifts of friendship bracelets, pony bead keychains, embroidery floss hair wraps. This is the sort of jewellery that comes with summer camp and late July nights, when your skin is sticky from the heat and you’re walking home with friends, talking a hundred miles an hour and feeling a kind of certainty and boundless joy that becomes rare, endangered, sometimes extinct, in adulthood. The bracelets and crowns might not have precious gems, but they were, without question, valuable - and while they might not be as storied or famous as the Koh-i-Noor as we discovered in this week’s episode, they were heavy with meaning.

Jennifer

Something Up My Sleeve

When I was little, I had this incredible floral dress, smocked on the front, which I adored. Green-blue ditsy print? Check. Peter Pan collar? Check. Lacy trim? Check. Long puffy sleeves? Check. I was so keen on this dress that I wore it for days and refused to give it up in exchange for clean clothes. Eventually, my mother had to wrestle it off me, but it continued to be a favourite until it was thread-bare and too small for me. I miss that dress. Well, let me clarify: I don’t really want to wear a little girl’s summer dress these days, but I would like to find clothes that make me feel the way that dress made me feel. Ah well. Perhaps that kind of fever-pitch adoration is specific to childhood. Maybe I do want to wear a little girl's summer dress after all.

Or what about that excellent red pinafore - the one emblazoned with Scottish terriers, that inevitably went along with matching tights and a little white shirt, and shiny buckled shoes. I would absolutely wear that dress today - sure, maybe I’d skip the dog-printed tights and the patent leather mary janes, but I would wear a nice plaid pinafore every day forever if it were socially acceptable (and maybe even if it weren’t.) These days, you may be surprised to learn that it is not common to find adult women’s clothing that feature black and white terriers in a jolly little line, trimming a skirt, more’s the pity. At some point, we all decided that we no longer wanted velour kitten sweatshirts or giraffe pajamas, much to my sadness and confusion. I long for vibrantly coloured stirrup pants and denim bucket hats, with big daisies on the front. Or how about my first pair of jeans, embroidered and emblazoned as they were with lobsters on the pockets? Who among us doesn’t want lobster jeans?

I am being facetious - but only slightly. Perhaps it isn’t the specifics of the clothing - the animal designs, the bizarre embroidery, the coordinated outfits - it’s the way those clothes meant only joy, only feeling like myself, only satisfaction before I tore off to make magic potions in the bathroom sink or organise a safari in my backyard. These days, of course, jeans do not immediately spark joy, with or without lobsters: they induce panic and fretting, and sometimes quite a lot of math. Am I this size or this size? No one knows, and no one can know - sizing for women’s clothing is one of our universe’s greatest mysteries, like quantum physics and the Crazy Frog song. When faced with impenetrable sizing systems and endless choices, all dubious - high-waisted, low-rise, skinny, straight, barrel-leg, wide-leg, stretch, distressed, selvege, vintage, boot-cut, flare, cropped, ankle, shaping, five-pocket, acid-wash, dark-wash, light-wash, jeggings - maybe embroidered lobsters would be welcome. Perhaps we could use cheerful crustacean friends to guide us through an ocean of jeans.

Anne goes basically feral about the ideal dress - puffed sleeves and all - and I think, especially in this modern world of fast fashion, of vanity sizing, of the tyranny of choice - perhaps we might like very much the simplicity of having only three dresses, as Anne does, and an extra special one for Christmas - puffed sleeves or not.

Jennifer

Be True to Your School

My high school experience felt quite normal to me, but in the years since my graduation, I have learned that this is not so. I went to an all-girls school, for one, and wore a uniform about which I have mixed feelings even to this day, for six years. My school was also very small, so any sporting event was reason enough to get all the students (all five hundred of us) on the bleachers in the gym to support each and every team. Volleyball, floor hockey, basketball, handball - you name it. If there was a game on, we were trouped into the gym, handed noisemakers and cheerleading pompoms, and encouraged to scream ourselves hoarse. This was quite different to our normal way of life. If, in class, the volume rose too high, our teachers were wont to look ferociously down their noses at us and utter a single word: “Ladies…” This shut us up every time. So imagine our delight at not only being allowed to be loud, but down right spurred to do so! I didn’t always follow the games especially well, not knowing the rules of most sports, but it wasn’t hard to holler along when everyone else did, and chat with my friends in between screaming sessions.
Perhaps the best part about all this school spirit was our mascot. Our school teams were the Flames, and an image of a lighted torch always accompanied our high school’s motto and name. It’s not a bad team name, as sports teams go, and you could do worse than a torch as a school logo. Someone had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make a torch mascot costume, worn by an enthusiastic girl in the grade below mine, and she did her mightiest to work us all into the appropriate frenzy - dressed, as best as I could tell, as a bright orange onion. The torch costume was not convincing, and I have to assume that competing teams were bewildered and perplexed by a school that stamped and bellowed when bidden to do so by a human-sized polyester allium bulb.
Now, of course, we had chants, and charming little songs, and made all the noise we could muster with the school-sanctioned hand clappers, tambourines, and even kazoos (an ear-splitting experience we only did once). Our school did not have cheerleaders (too small, and only girls), so when faced with school events, the received wisdom seemed to be that if no one was a cheerleader, then we all were. My mother has often remarked that a church with a good choir will often have a congregation who slacks when it comes to singing hymns, and the same maxim appears to be true of high school sports events. If you have no cheerleaders to lead chants and bounce around energetically, then the ‘congregation’, as it were, must take on the mantle and do it themselves. So it was: I routinely shook a tambourine and howled for sports I didn’t understand, adding my voice to the din when our side got a foul, whatever that was, or scored a goal - or was it a try? I didn’t know, and I cared less.
Mob mentality gets a bad rap, probably rightly. But there was something thrilling and exciting about leaping up with my friends and all four hundred and ninety or so other girls when the basketball team won their provincial tournament, shrieking and jumping up and down so enthusiastically that the bleachers shook. I did not know the first thing about three-pointers or travelling, but I did know that the girls on the court were ecstatic at their success, and it was intoxicating to join them in their joy. Besides, there is nothing quite like seeing a schoolmate - sobbing with elation (her sister was on the team), running up and down the length of the bleachers, inciting greater and greater throes of wild celebration - dressed like an onion.

Jennifer

House of Dreams

In the fifth installment of the Anne series, our beloved protaganist moves into her very own home, her ‘House of Dreams’. Anne’s House of Dreams has lombardy trees and an old-fashioned garden, china dogs on the mantle, and drift wood in the fireplace. My house of dreams is a bit different. I have, in the course of the research for this project, looked up those china dogs, and they are green, so my house goes without a Gog and Magog.

Instead, my house of dreams has a window seat, kitted out for our cat’s express use, which looks out over the front garden, which is planted in the English style - that is to say, higgledy-piggledy, barely contained wildness. The facade is brick, ensconced in trees and box hedge with a creaky gate that squeaks as you come in. There is a light on over the front door to welcome you in, and a sonorous doorbell. The front door has a kickplate and a charming doorknocker in the shape of a robin.
Every seat in the living room is furnished with an obvious place to put a mug of tea and a book. There are books in every room. The kitchen is always stocked with goodies for sharing: the sorts of things that you put out when friends drop by. Sweating jugs of lemonade and iced tea for the oppressive heat of summer afternoons; spiced tea for crisp autumn mornings; cookies and hot cocoa for winter Sunday visits that curl up in the embrace of wool blankets; peppermint tea for misty springtime gatherings. Sunlight streams in the windows and handmade curtains wave in the breeze. The floors pop and creak when you walk down the hall or up the stairs. There is a dog snoozing in a basket beside my desk as I work, and the cat, of course, has taken up her post in the bay window, surveilling her domain. There is local art on the walls and the strains of music coming from my husband’s office. There are spare beds and extra slippers, sweet-smelling soap and fresh flowers from the garden.
Oh, the garden! Follow that curving stone path from the back door past the raised beds and the vegetable patch and the trellis and the esplanaded trees. Just as you wish for a place to sit, a charming bench comes in to view, partially hidden by forsythia and shaded by Japanese magnolia. There isn’t any grass, just flowering thyme and a carpet of clover. The dog loves it. You’re likely to meet a cheerful neighbour over the fence, who will compare notes on the coming rain and bulbs they planted in the spring.
However, despite all these differences, there are some similarities. Just ike Anne’s home, my house of dreams is also fictional.

Jennifer

My Cup of Tea

I am not a coffee drinker. I have tried coffee, many times, and it’s just not for me. I know it is a popular beverage, guzzled by the gallon or sipped in Italian cafes at eye-watering strength, loaded with flavoured creamers and sugar or stomached black and bitter, but while coffee smells absolutely delicious, it tastes very much to me like a soggy rug. I cannot imagine why someone would wish to begin their morning by drinking a cup of dirty molded carpet out of a car recently returned from the Outer Hebrides, but to each their own.

But tea? Tea is…well, my cup of tea. Every morning, I get up and fill up the kettle, choose my mug, drop a tea bag or strainer full of leaves into it, and wait for the water to boil. My kettle reminds me of a spaceship - it’s round, and glows blue while the water heats up. Then I wait for the tea to steep - this is a persnickety process. Some varieties, like the decaffeinated Earl Grey I favour in afternoons, are pitifully weak and need to steep for a long time, unless I want to drink a sad, grey cup of hot water, which tastes as though someone in the next room said ‘tea’. But the loose-leaf chai that usually starts my morning is powerful stuff and needs a scant few minutes to produce a robust, spicy, warming cup, perfect for the chilly days of winter. Now that the temperatures are rising, I still reach for tea, but more often I am reaching for haystack, or Earl Grey, or white tea, or genmaicha, a Japanese green tea that is mixed with popped rice, which has a toasty, slightly sweet flavour reminiscent of caramel and popcorn.

I started to drink tea as a kid, sipping ‘baby tea’ - essentially, quite a lot of hot milk with a bit of tea - with my mother. Since then, tea has become a panacea, an all-purpose potion. It soothes sore throats, sadness, and social interactions. Someone coming over this afternoon? Tea. Sweating in the summer heat? Tea (iced, of course). Working in a chilly office? Tea. Need a break from that work? Tea. Heavy-duty chats with a friend? Tea. Meeting an acquaintance at a coffee shop? Tea. Tea does it all - wakes you up, calms you down, warms you, cools you, busies your hands, stills your mind. Tea, it seems to me, answers all questions.

And that’s only the drinking. The making of tea presents a whole world of possibilities. Filling the kettle, preparing your cup, pouring the water, watching the tea steep, adding milk, curling your hand around the mug - what a beautiful, day-starting dance! To say nothing of choosing your mug or cup. Should it be the novelty owl mug, which holds a bathtub’s worth of tea? The demure botanical print mugs, with matching green tea pot, passed down to me from my grandmother? Or the even more delicate china cups, rimmed with pale blue flowers? The mug brought home from that trip with that friend? I reached for the art history mug when I was grading papers as a teacher, and now I favour a book-emblazoned cup when I write. But no matter the mug, I know that the ritual of making tea, and then of drinking a cup (or two, or three), will set the world to rights and give me whatever comfort I need. You could say it suits me to a tea.

Jennifer

Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 1

Fruitcake (Bara Brith)

Now, dear reader, this is a fruitcake, but it is not the kind people typically eat at Christmas. Those recipes usually call for a lot of tricky-to-find ingredients - candied this, glazed that - and one usually soaks the resulting paving stone of cake in a lot of rum. Frankly, dear reader, this is the sort of recipe my mother can handle, but I am not grown up enough yet to face it. Instead, I offer you a simpler recipe that produces a snacking cake studded and sweetened with dried fruit - similar to the Christmas fruitcake, it is old-fashioned and satisfying, but much easier to pull off. This cake is called bara brith, Welsh for spotted bread, named for the plump, tea-soaked fruit that features in this loaf cake. Why did I choose this one? Well, because like a traditional fruitcake, bara brith relies on dried, re-hydrated fruit for its sweetness and texture. Plus, it’s a personal favourite. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Ingredients:

300 g mixed dried fruit (you’ll typically see raisins or currants, but I am partial to chopped apricots or cranberries, too - follow your heart here, dear reader)
200 g sugar
zest of 1 orange
250 g hot black tea (the variety is up to you - I like Earl Grey because of its bergamot oil, which combines well with the orange zest)
350 g self-rising flour
10 g mixed spice (this is equal parts cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and clove, but I measure these out with my heart, not a teaspoon. Skip the clove for a more modern flavour)
1 egg
50 g softened butter, plus extra for the cake tin

Instructions:
In a large bowl, mix together the fruit, sugar, and the orange zest. Pour the hot tea over this mixture, and allow to soak overnight.
Heat your oven to 160 C. Butter and line your cake tin with parchment.
In a large bowl, combine flour and spice thoroughly. Add the fruit mixture, including the liquid, in thirds, mixing thoroughly. Add your egg and butter, then mix until your batter is well-combined and somewhat stiff. The cake is dense, so the batter will be, too.
Bake for 60-75 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. If you notice the top begin to brown too much, cover the top with foil.
Leave the cake to cool in the tin, about 10 minutes. Then put your finished cake on a baking rack and allow to cool completely. Serve slices on their own, or with butter. Tea is not a requirement, but the two go together very well. Enjoy!

Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 2

Layer Cake

This recipe recalls the layer cake that Anne makes with anodyne liniment in this chapter, but you’ll no doubt notice, dear listener, that this recipe contains no liniment of any kind! Instead, what we have here is a cake for celebrations - birthday parties, extravagant picnics, tea with your best china and best friend, or just a particularly delightful Sunday afternoon. Also know that you can substitute the more Victorian fillings and finishing details with your favourite buttercream frosting to bring this cake into the twenty-first century, to suite more modern tastes!

Ingredients:

1/2 c butter, melted, plus more for cake tins
2 c sifted all-purpose flour, plus more for cake tins
1 tbsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 1/4 c granulated sugar
1 c milk (2%)
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla (definitely NOT anodyne liniment!)

Arrange the oven racks so your cakes will sit in the centre of your oven. Preheat your oven to 350 F (180 C). Butter and flour two nine-inch cake pans. Set them aside.
In a large bowl, add you flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Mix together.
Add the melted butter and milk to the flower mixture and stir to wet the dry ingredients.
Beat the mixture with an electric mixer (or a whisk, if you’re looking for a workout!) for about a minute, until thoroughly combined.
Finally, add your eggs and vanilla to the batter, then beat for another three minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl.
Pour the batter evenly into your cake tins. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into each cake comes out clean. Allow to cool for at least ten minutes in the pan, and then completely on a cooling rack, once de-panned.

Now, the world is your oyster - at least, when it comes to this cake. You could choose a luscious, wobbly lemon curd as filling, a ruby-bright layer of raspberry jam, or the glowing sunset of apricot preserves instead. You could go for a Victoria sandwich and pair strawberry jam and freshly-whipped cream as your cake’s filling. And, as mentioned above, any favourite frosting is always an option. Like a sandwich, this cake can contain all sorts of delicious and delightful fillings, depending on your mood - so have fun! When it comes to the top of your cake, you can leave it bare to show off the delicious middle of your creation. You could dust it with powdered sugar and decorate with fresh or dried fruit or preserved flowers for an extra special touch. Or if you wanted to get really Victorian, you could try a layer of marzipan to seal the deal! Or, if you are hoping for a finish that is less taxing but still very satisfying, a simple powdered sugar glaze will harden if allowed to cool, adding sweetness and a little texture to your cake. Sounds like good eating, however you slice it!

Jennifer

Make your cake and eat it, too: Part 3

Pound cake

The original recipe for pound cake, as we discovered in this week’s episode, calls for a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Not only does that make an absolutely gargantuan amount of batter, but it is also very expensive - it uses A LOT of eggs and A LOT of butter. Thankfully, the ratio is the thing: all we have to do to get a smaller, more manageable final result, is to reduce our amounts. If you want a crowd-sized, historically accurate cake, dear reader, go for broke and use a pound each of every ingredient. Otherwise, you’ll need the following:

Ingredients

1 c butter, softened, plus butter for the cake pan
1 c sugar
5 eggs
1 c flour, plus flour for the cake pan

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees C. Butter and flour two 13x9 cake tins, or an equivalent-sized Bundt pan.
In a large bowl, cream your butter and sugar together until they are light and creamy. Because there are no chemical leaveners in this recipe, you must cream your butter and sugar together very well, until all the sugar has dissolved (you can test this by pinching a bit of the mixture between your fingers and feeling for sugar granules - when fully mixed, it should feel smooth). When properly creamed, the mixture will also be a paler colour, because of all the air you’ve added in.
Mix in your eggs, one at a time, and stir together to combine.
Finally, add in your flour, in two or three additions to make mixing easier and less messy, until just combined. Be careful not to over-mix your batter; that will make it tough.
Divide your batter evenly between your two pans (a scale can help with this, but you can also eyeball it) and smooth the tops with a spatula.
Bake in your preheated oven for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the cakes comes out clean. If you notice that your cakes are browning too quickly, tent them with some aluminium foil.
Allow your baked cakes to rest in the pans, about 15-20 minutes, and then transfer to a baking rack to cool completely. Serve in slices on its own, or pair this flexible multi-tasker with fruit, ice-cream, a simple powdered sugar glaze - anything that makes your heart happy!

Now, there are many ways to add other flavours to this recipe - lemon zest for a lemon pound cake, vanilla extract for a vanilla version, and any sort of flavoured frosting (chocolate for instance) to up the tasty factor, but there is also something really charming and satisfying about the original. Enjoy!

Monster Mash

I have an over-active imagination. I always have. As a kid, watching a frightening scene in a movie (and the bar for what I counted as frightening was astonishingly low) could leave me with nightmares for weeks. My parents found it easier to skip through a lot of films, or end them early, than to be woken up for the better part of a month by my tremulous voice calling ‘Mummy!’ every night.

Sadly, this tendency hasn’t gone. It’s sort of cute when you’re three. When you’re thirty, though, it becomes a lot less charming. I saw a still - just an image, mind you - of Gary Oldman as Dracula in Coppola’s 1992 film, and now my brain is absolutely convinced that Gary Oldman-Dracula lives in my shower, waiting to pounce when I get up for a drink of water. Horrible, vivid images plague me - at times, my mind offers up a long-fingered hand, with nails overgrown and cracked, that presses against my bedroom window and leaves smears of blood on the glass. This is sometimes replaced by a heavy body with sinewy arms dragging itself up my hallway, legs immobile, eye sockets empty. A face leers out at me from my bathroom mirror, eyes wild and wide, with too many teeth and face stretched into a too-wide grimace - but I only see it in the corner of my eye, in the half-light of evening. And now, Gary Oldman in a ludicrous wig and velvet robe joins these apparitions, licking blood from a razor, strangling hands poised to snatch at me from behind my shower curtain. I know, I know that these things are not real, cannot harm me - in the light of day. But at night, when the air is still and dark, it is quite a different matter.

So you can imagine that Hallowe’en presents some problems. Hallowe'en is a complex time of year for me. I love sweets, but hate to be scared. As a child, trick-or-treating was never really in my wheelhouse, so my parents and grand-parents adjusted the traditional system to accommodate a shy, fearful pre-schooler. Instead of going from door to door, hollering childish threats at people I'd never met, we went straight to Gramma and Grampa's house. I wore my customary mouse costume, the one that was, to my memory, made of shag carpet, and could go over my clothes instead of a parka and snow-pants, which are often as necessary for a Winnipeg Hallowe'en as the requisite plastic pumpkin bucket.

I did not scream “Trick or treat!” at my grandparents' front door. I didn't know about 'trick-or-treat' as an option for Hallowe'ening. Instead, after labouring up their front steps in my stuffy costume, I rang the doorbell and called “Hallowe'en apples!” in a sing-song voice. I have no idea from where this chant originated. I didn't have any apples. Whatever the logic (or lack thereof), that is what I shouted, and without fail, my grandmother would open the door and exclaim over my costume before ushering me inside for home-made treats and other forms of extravagant spoiling. This was the extent of my Hallowe'en experience: in fact, until I reached school, Hallowe'en meant dressing up and visiting Gramma and Grampa's, two of my favourite things.

But then I began grade school, and Hallowe'en took on fuller meaning. Suddenly there needed to be an indoor costume for school, and an outdoor one for trick-or-treating. I still went to my grandparents' house dressed as a mouse, but during the day, I had to have something different for the costume parade and the other festive activities on offer. My mother was kind enough to provide me with a sparkly tulle skirt and leotard, which worked very well for a ballerina, or, when furnished with a plastic crown and wand, a fairy. (When I got older, more adventurous costumes like Queen Cleopatra or a bunch of grapes seemed like good ideas). The costume parade consisted of twenty-odd first-graders marching around our classroom in a circle. I hated promenading up and down for people to gawk at me, so the costume parade made me squirm. I recall heaving a sigh of relief when we were finally allowed to sit back down in our little desks and glue facial features onto paper pumpkins, or make ghosts out of tissue paper. The worst part of the day was no doubt Madame Gordon's French lesson. We trouped down to her classroom in our now-wilted costumes and sat in the creaky wooden desks before her. There was typically a crossword puzzle and a word search for us to hunt down 'sorciere' and 'citrouille' and 'phantome', which I was perfectly happy to complete. But then, with what I maintain was gleeful cruelty, Madame would plonk her ancient tape-player on her desk and make us sing along to a terrifying song: 'C'est l'Hallowe'en.' In retrospect, the ditty itself was harmless: I have listened to it since then, and it's basically a few descriptive verses, with a bouncy, repetitive, chanting chorus of “C'est l'Hallowe'en, c'est l'Hallowe'en”. But the recording was laced with eerie sound-effects that matched the lyrics. Particularly, the scratchy violin that illustrated the coiling nature of “un serpent bleu” sent a frisson of nerves jangling down my spine.

Hallowe'en continued in this vein for some time before it changed again. High school brought on parties, where I was expected to wear costumes and bring snacks. I was happy with this situation. I will admit, however, that I didn't quite get the memo about sexy costumes. Now that I was old enough to make my own costuming decisions, I had a good time coming up with what I thought were fun and interesting choices. I went as Marcel Marceau's Bip the clown one year, and as the Dead Sea another. I made a red felt cape, antennae, and wore pearls for a lady-bug costume of which I was particularly proud. Later costumes included Spinelli from the television cartoon Recess, and the Paper-bag Princess from Robert Munsch's book by the same name. Clearly my tastes leaned towards what might be called juvenile.

It was around this time that I began to learn more about Hallowe'en itself. All Saints' and All Souls' Day from the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church were meant to be spent remembering the dearly departed and praying to the litany of saints. Indeed, the name Hallowe'en derives from All Hallow's Eve, where 'hallows' is a synonym for holy or sanctified. This tradition carries on in the Mexican Dios de los Muertos, or days of the dead, when lost loved ones are honoured with feasting and grave-side visits and offerings. In Europe, particularly in England, the fear of death came to override the memorial elements of the festival, and it was believed that alongside the spirits of the dead, demons and devils would walk the earth and wreak havoc. This notion was embroidered and developed to the point where many people believed (and some do to this day) that the gates of Hell open on the 31st of October, and that all the horrid things who take up residence there visit the physical world to spread evil and cause trouble. Tasty treats set out for deceased family members soon became peace offerings to assuage the brutal natures of these hellish visitors. In time, it became customary for people, typically young men, to dress as demons or angry ghosts, in part to blend in with the roaming ghoulies, and partly to enjoy the free food on offer. If nice nibbles were not available to placate the 'demons', these rogues, perhaps spurred on by their devilish counterparts, performed mischievous acts, meant to frighten or inconvenience, but not to harm, their stingy victims. This practice was called guising or mumming, and is the origin of our modern-day trick-or-treating. In a way, these traditions use humour and fun to mock death and the unknown, and give us tools to come to grips with things that normally confuse, frighten, and disturb us. I am particularly fond of the logic that dictates that if something or someone should scare you, you should laugh at it, and then feed it goodies. Maybe I ought to try that with Gary Oldman-Dracula.

Other scary traditions have become entangled with this holiday, so that now we are not in the least surprised to see werewolves, vampires, and monsters alongside demons and ghosts. These frightening creatures come to us from a variety of sources, including Gothic literature, folk tales, horror films, and national customs. Originally a holiday for all ages, the more recent focus on children at Hallowe'en means that downright cute and cuddly costumes and celebrations are commonplace. Such as, for example, a mouse costume, or visits to grandparents. One way or the other, I've come to like Hallowe'en, despite my distaste for scary stuff. It's a time of year when normalcy is suspended: indulging in buckets of candy (literally) is encouraged, the frightening and ferocious is embraced and fed tasty treats, and disguising yourself, as a monster or a mouse, is an essential part of the fun.

Jennifer

One Horse Open Sleigh

It is not the correct time of year to be day-dreaming about riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, but in spite of the flowers and budding trees, the image of a carved sleigh whisking through the snow behind a prancing pony (all right, a prancing cart horse), leaving nothing but clean sleigh tracks in its wake, is a delightful one. Add to that excitement the thrill of being unsupervised by a chaperone, as Anne, Diana, and their friends are in this week’s chapter, and suddenly a whole world of prospects opens up.

I remember very clearly when one of my closest high school friends got her licence. She was the first in our group of friends to get it, and similarly to Anne and Diana, our horizons widened. We could go where we liked, without having to ask for rides from parents or cranky older siblings. The world was our oyster, and we went wherever the wind (and a second-hand hatchback) could take us! In reality, that turned out to be exactly the same places we had gone in parent-driven minivans: the local mall, the cheap-seat movie theatre, school dances, sleepovers at friends’ houses. There were some minor differences, in the end, but they felt crucial at the time. The first was that we chose the music: instead of 102.3 Clear FM, which played what I derisively thought of as ‘soccer mom music’, we blasted sugary, mind-numbing indie pop, usually played from scribbled-upon CDs, filled with downloaded favourites of questionable quality. The second was that we always owed our friend gas money.

I never learned to drive. I took the classes and passed the test, and spent weeks practicing in a car with two steering wheels and two sets of brakes: one for me, one for the instructor. Behind the wheel, I completely lost my nerve. The thought of hitting something - or worse, someone - loomed so large for me that even getting into the driver’s seat sent my stomach plummeting to somewhere in the region of my feet. My enduring memory of trying to learn to drive is a view through the front windshield, the road coming at me so fast it made my head spin, hands obediently at ten and two, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my fingers turned white. I left indents in the pleather steering wheel cover. I can tell you, dear reader, from experience, that it is very challenging to drive and scream-cry at the same time: tears obscure the vision rather, which is not ideal.

Much earlier in life, I did learn to ride horses. So, frankly, I suspect I would be much more at home driving a ‘one horse open sleigh’ than behind the wheel of any motor vehicle. Someone once expressed incredulity at this bizarre set of skills, and to an extent, I see their point: I am perhaps better equipped to be an eighteenth century gentlewoman than a modern girl, educated as I have been to ride horses and knit and sew and paint charming cards and, horror of horrors, read novels. If I could lay my hands on a decent set of stays and panniers, I’d be all set. But my feeling is that choosing horses over horsepower is perfectly reasonable - they are much prettier, and they have self-preservation. I’ve seen Thelma and Louise: cars will go careening off cliffs if they are left to their own devices. Horses are much more sensible - generally speaking, in my experience, if you let a horse go where it likes, it will go home. Admirable creatures. Besides, they haven’t written any classic holiday songs about driving cars, have they? But a ‘one horse open sleigh’ was obviously a worthy enough subject to deserve its own hymn. Makes sense to me. Jingle all the way!

Jennifer