Christmas In July. Sort Of!

I made these cute biscuits on the weekend as a practice run for 80-odd I'll be making for my cousin's engagement party. I'm none too confident with biscuits but - whether it was because I was paying especial care, or it was just a great recipe - these are a winner. Think gingerbread with no ginger - spicy and more chewy than crunchy. I did a half batch and got about twenty out of it using two largish snowflake cutters. We shan't discuss how many there would have been if I hadn't picked at the straggly bits of cookie dough as I cut the biscuits out...

CHRISTMAS SPICE BISCUITS - Margaret Fulton's "Baking"

2 2/3c (400g) SR flour
Pinch of salt
1 1/2tsp each of ground cinnamon, ground cloves and ground nutmeg
1tsp ground white pepper (I used black pepper with no apparent ill effects)
1/2c (110g) each of castor sugar and firmly packed brown sugar
250g butter, diced
1/3c milk
1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
Decorating stuff (I used royal icing, silver cachous and disco dust, plus a snowflake stencil

Oven at 180oC. Line trays with baking paper (I used 2 trays for a half batch)

Sift everything as far as the sugars into a large bowl. Add butter and rub in until resembles breadcrumbs (or be lazy like me and dump the whole lot in a food processor to do most of the work then finish it off by hand).

Combine milk and bicarb in a cup and stir into flour mixture (I used a butter knife to get it started). Knead lightly to form a firm but elastic dough (I kept going until it stuck together properly and could roll a ball with it. Wouldn't say it was an especially light knead but it came out okay). Halve dough, wrap in Glad wrap and refrigerate 30mins.

Roll out dough (leave other bit in fridge) to about 4mm and cut with cutters of choice. Re-knead dough scraps and re chill before rolling out again.

Bake 15-20mins or until golden. Keep an eye on them as they will catch quickly. You may need to rotate pans. Decorate as desired (recipe suggests a dusting of icing sugar.

Unexpected Grief

I've been cleaning my childhood bedroom out a bit and in my desk drawer came across my yearbook from my last year of high school. I was flipping through when I came across a photographic montage - a two page spread which I helped collate all those years ago - and smiling out at me were the faces of two classmates who have since passed away. They were so young in those photos, with so much ahead of them. At least, they should have had so much ahead of them.

I was close with neither Mat nor Eva, although both ran in the same crowd, which was loosely attached to my (dorkier) crowd. They weren't so high above my friends and I that they would ignore us or make us feel we weren't worthy of breathing the same air as them with a single glance like the cool kids did, and although not really friends with them our paths would cross in the playground and, in later years, at parties.

Mat was in my Chinese class for years and I had a tiny crush on him in year eight. He was one of those guys that just shouldn't have died young. He was smart and funny and sporty and kind and cheeky and was no doubt destined for great things. He had spectacularly curly, dark hair, a dimple and a very slight lisp. To cap it all off he was dating probably the sweetest girl to ever walk this earth, Petrea. The yearbook tells me that at the time they were the most inseparable couple in the year level.

I don't think they were still an item when he died but I'm pretty sure they were still best friends, and that she had to bury two of her best friends within the first eight years of leaving high school is just grossly unfair. Mat's best friend Jason, who was also the son of a favourite teacher at our school, had been travelling with him just before he died, gave a eulogy... and within about four years also had to bury his brother who died in a car accent.

Mat died while travelling in South America. I don't know what country or the exact circumstances, although the grape vine told me that he had been travelling alone in a fairly remote area and when nobody heard from him in a few days they raised the alarm with DFAT. Eventually a tour operator got wind of a white guy who had been found by some villagers in a river, and they had given him a proper burial. It would seem he had slipped, hit his head on a rock and drowned.

I don't know how long it was between him going missing and his funeral, that around 6-800 attended. It was at least a couple of weeks and longer than it should have been because he had to be identified and shipped home. If it felt like forever to me then I can't even imagine what waiting must have been like for his loved ones.

Eva died in the Black Saturday bush fires, along with both of her parents. I believe Kinglake address listed in the yearbook is the house they died in. Her brother wasn't home that day and in the space of a couple of hours he lost his entire family as well as his best friend.

Eva's dad, Richard Zann, was a greatly respected scientist specialising in animal behaviour with a special affinity towards zebra finches and other birds. He was also one of my university lecturers, an odd, quietly intelligent man who taught me statistics - not my favourite subject!

At their memorial service I felt guilty when I realised Eva had joined our school in Year 4 and not Year 7 as I had thought. How could I have just not remembered three years of her life?? That Dr Zann's passing was a bigger thing to me (maybe because if the added layer of it being a massive loss to the scientific community) than the loss of Eva also made me feel awful, and wasn't something I even realised until afterwards. But as I said, I was never close to Eva and I shouldn't feel bad for that.

I don't feel like I have the right to be touched like this just by opening an old book... but I have been crying like a baby the whole time I have been writing this. I just feel so badly for that wonderful group of humans that were their friends. I hope they don't have to endure much more pain because it doesn't seem fair. But I guess life isn't fair. I also hope that if they are reading this that they are not offended that I shared something so personal to them with you.

Another student passed away somewhere between Mat and Eva. It was suicide, and the news was whispered around quietly and then forgotten. There was no mass funeral, no outpouring of grief for Ben (the second Ben we lost - the first died of cancer in Year 12) or sympathy for his family. I scarcely remember him except that he was fairly quiet and would blush easily. I vaguely recall that he had a temper, wasn't a good student and had the most brilliant blue, but sad, eyes I have ever seen but that's it. In some ways, his passing is more tragic than Mat and Eva's.

One day in Chinese class, Mat was sitting with his friend Nathan in front of my friend Kaye and I and tormenting us playfully as he was wont to do. Suddenly he turned to me and said "do you like Reid?" (Um, yes. Big, fat, embarrassing, ridiculous crush. But c'mon, he was a hottie!) When I admitted it - an humiliating moment for an overweight, thoroughly uncool Year 8 girl - he said "but how can you like him? You never even talk to him." I didn't know what to say but he was right. Wise words, and a piece of wisdom I have applied to several areas of my life since. I was also stunned to register that Mat thought the only thing wrong with the equation was that I didn't really know Reid, and that the invisible barrier between dorks and the rest of the world could apparently be breached just by speaking to someone, which was news to me.

Thanks, Mat. I won't forget that. I'm sorry that you're gone and I hope you and Eva and Ben are all okay and happy, wherever you are. I am sure you are all missed by many, and I'm quite sure the world missed out on something great when you left it.

Book Review - Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela

This book has been on my mum's bookshelf for almost as long as I can recall. I think, in the beginning, I had a natural aversion to it on account of the fact that she had recommended it to me. Same reason as I hated Nirvana and the Foo Fighters and Metallica - because my brother liked them.

I know. I'm a dolt.

But I'm a loveable dolt! Right??? *looks hopeful*

Two vaguely interesting although minor segues - one, two of my closest friends Al and Emma have both read this book. As in, this copy. As in, they spend maybe 10 hours per year in my mum's house and they still read it before I did. Al beat it to me by a good ten years, perhaps even closer to fifteen (although it can't be fifteen because I didn't meet him until 1998).

Two, I had the opportunity to meet Nelson Mandela, thanks to Al... and I turned it down because I didn't really want to race to the station and catch a train into town and THEN find wherever it was this youth conference was being held, on time, all on my own (bear in mind that this was in a time before Google Maps and iPhones) - I think it was Etihad Stadium, previously known as Docklands Stadium, the Telstra Dome and Colonial Stadium, depending on who sponsored it that week . As it turns out, I would have been grossly underdressed to meet a leader of such global significance (I was wearing more casual clothing than the girl in burgandy shirt below), plus, at the time I knew he was a pretty awesome dude but that was about it because at seventeen I just had NO clue what the fuss was about... so my scardey-bone winning out probably wasn't such a terrible thing. Imagine an awkward moment where Dr Mandela asks me a really deep question and I blink at him like a goldfish, and that is how it would have gone.

This is a picture from the Day I Could Have Met Nelson Mandela But Didn't. Al is the well-dressed young man in the centre, and the guy over his shoulder to the left is another friend I have long since lost contact with, but who my money is still on to make a mark on the world somehow. I think I was also his first kiss during a highschool game of spin the bottle! The lady to the left of him was my Year 7 tute teacher, as well as my humanities teacher, and she was an odd one. Normally she was lovely, but don't even consider crossing her because she could just turn on you and get reeeeeeally nasty. As in, her eyes would send daggers of ice into your heart. I wonder what became of her, and what she was actually like outside of the classroom...

Anyway, back to the book.

It certainly WAS a long walk to freedom! But not in the same way that you felt you suffered through every single step and every single day that Brad Pitt spent in his Seven Years in Tibet (mind you, I was fifteen when I saw it so I may get more value out of it now). No, this was an informative and enlightening journey; and, as I find happens when I read any sort of book that lays down the history of a region, I felt like I understand the world a little better. It really is true that to move forward you have to acknowledge- but not dwell on - what came before.

The only thing I will say against it is that it is the only true (auto)biography I have read (the closest I have come is Three Cups of Tea, which is a really interesting book about Dr Greg Mortimer's experience building schools where girls are welcome, in the Pakistani foothills of the Himalayas), and that so far I don't find (auto)biographies to really be my style. Obviously that's not the fault of the author - it's just a matter of preference on my part. Some, like Three Cups of Tea, are written as though they are a story and that makes it a more enjoyable read for me. It is probably testament to the fact that Three Cups of Tea was a story told by the Dr Greg to the author, who then documented his journey. Long Walk to Freedom, on the other hand, was actually written by Dr Mandela, with only fact-checking and re-writing of confiscated sections completed or co-written by others.

As a novel (which I had mistakenly thought it was) it is a little bit heavy on the detail, but it's not a novel at all (well done, Vanessa. Well done.) - it's a work of non-fiction; an historical document, if you will. It chronicles every single name of every single person involved in any vague way with the fight for freedom in South Africa, and on what dates they particpated in that fight. Because of that saturation of information I can only recall literally a handful of names used (note: I began writing this six weeks ago and have since forgotten all but two names). But because  it is an autobiography it therefore makes sense to document the minutae of Dr Mandela's (and the African National Congress') struggle for freedom and for non-racial democracy in South Africa.

It begins with his childhood on his father's "farm" in the country, and his gradual move to the city for education. He completes highschool and obtains a law degree, all whilst being a major player in the ANC - initially in its youth arm and then then later in the main body of the organisation. Later still, as the fight intensifies, he founds an armed arm (heh. Sorry about that) of the organisation in response to the white government's refusal to cease violence against blacks, coloureds and Indians. (That's something else I learnt - that the three groups were treated separately, and that there was a hierarchy amongst them in terms of how the white government viewed them.) The book also describes the lengthy trial against himself and other freedom fighters, and what follows is quite a large portion of the book taking place on Roben Island, where Mandela was incarcerated for the majority of his 27 years in prison.

I never really understood the significance of Mandela being freed, or the circumstances under which he was locked up, until I read this. I knew it was a great step forward for the world when he was released, but I didn't know why. Some would call him a trouble-maker, and there is no question at all that he was a law-breaker and a revolutionary, but only because he existed in a climate that made it all but impossible to live freely in a lawful fashion. Being criminalised was an obvious outcome of not being allowed some quite basic freedoms.

I would definitely recommend a read. It willl take you quite a while to get through, but it is compelling enough to help you cope with the length. At the very least it should help you appreciate some very basic freedoms that we take for granted.

Lastly, it also raised some interesting questions in my mind about accepting the status quo in today's age, at least in the Western world (watch out, my mind's about to wander off-topic!). The freedoms we fight for seem so very trivial when you consider the marginalisation or unfair laws that various ethnic groups suffer in different parts of the world - even when they represent the majority of the population. These people's heads would probably explode if they ever heard about the CFMEU's latest EBA, and that under that agreement you can be paid around $1100 per 36-hour week for driving a 12-tonne truck (which just requires the appropriate licence), and $750 per week living away from home alowance. Sure, our cost of living is greater, but surely it's not twenty to forty times greater than the majority of African nations. Our expectations, on the other hand, probably are twenty to forty times higher, and that's the stuff mainstream society fights for here (freedom to own a flatscreen TV! Freedom for every family to own two cars! Freedom to not be made to do your homework! Freedom to be handed money by the government for breeding (accidentally or otherwise), and then the freedom to complain about not being paid enough to not work while you bring the kid up! (heh. Sorry. Capitalist rant over. Although this is an interesting read - barstool economics)), not real, basic freedoms.

With the focus in the West so heavily on individual entitlement and freedom to do whatever one jolly well pleases with no consequence and no thought of others (precious little petals that we are), surely it's only a matter of time until life as we know it collapses into a smoking heap of rubble. The lack of genuine freedom has a similarly chaotic effect - Long Walk to Freedom demonstrated that very clearly - but after the point where basic, actual freedoms are fought for and (hopefully) obtained it becomes a philosphical argument. Why should some little punk with his underwear sticking out the top of his pants, in the space of half an hour, be free to graffitti public property, evade train fares and listen to his iPod so loudly that everyone within a 20m radius can hear it, too? And if his freedom encroaches on my freedom to be proud of where I live, not be visually assaulted by his underwear (or worse, his bum crack) and enjoy a reasonable level of serenity, then why can't I be free to drag him by the ear to the local cop shop? It's my country, too, and I'm not so keen for jerks like that to exist.

And on it goes.

I think that that we in the West should take a moment to think about which freedoms are important and which are not. Society became regulated for a reason, and even the most basic structures in society have some form of regulation. Even a hive of bees has rules and structure and process.

So what freedoms would you give up? And what does freedom mean to you? And how far would you go to fight for it?

PS - I turned 30 last week, and I think it really shows in this cranky old lady rant. I'm enjoying this 30 business!