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The weather has turned. Overnight. I woke in the small hours of the morning dreaming that I was being force-fed ice cream and not liking it much. Trying to snuggle in against Mr Tabubil, I found that he’d he had taken his half of the blankets and rolled himself around and around like a caterpillar, so I climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the icy floor and to drag the rug up onto the bed with me.
Morning dawned sunless and sullen, with a dark, heavy sky. Cold, dark days inexorably bend my mind to thoughts of cooking. Hot food. Comforting food. Scones.
The pantry being unaccountably bare of clotted cream, I took my mother's scone recipe and swopped the sugar for mustard powder and tipped in a cup of grated parmesan cheese(a canny pantry keeper NEVER being short of a good nippy cheese) and set to stirring.
The scones came out hot and steaming and vaguely redolent of pizza, but something was missing so we peeled half a bushel or so of vegetables and whipped up a tureen of fragrant, autumnal,pumpkin soup.
By now, we were on a roll. The bit between our teeth, we turned out a batch of Chocolate-Guinness Ice-Cream (courtesy of David Lebovitz' A Perfect Scoop), a loaf of Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread and no less than two Madeira cakes.*
Between Madeira Cakes One and Two, Mr Tabubil made a run to the shops for more eggs and came back with an incidental sack full of whipping cream, so we shrugged our shoulders and whipped up a metric lake (give or take a liter) of that as well. With sugar and vanilla.
All of this sweet stuff was starting to jangle on our taste buds, so we rounded out the afternoon with a batch of Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. The oatmeal sounded healthy, and cookies looked granola-ish and virtuous, but as they stood steaming on the counter. Mr Tabubil began to swear that he could hear them begging to fulfil their true destiny as the world’s greatest ice-cream sandwiches. He even pulled The Perfect Scoop back off the shelf and searching the index for vanilla ice-cream, but it was dinnertime, so we stopped. And looked at the trays and tureens all around us, and began to wonder who might be available to help us eat some of it. And possibly begin to sweep up some of the flour on the kitchen floor.
The weather boffins are promising us a cold, wet winter, but if it doesn't clear up and let us out of the kitchen once in a while, what this winter is going to be is spherical.
*That old canard about opening an oven door on a rising sponge cake on a cold day? It's true. I opened the oven door a squeak to toss in a last dusting of sugar glaze and that sponge opened up like a Florida sinkhole on the first day of the rainy season and sank without even a sigh.
Cheese Scones
Ingredients
1 3/4 cup self raising flour
1/3 tsp salt
2 tsp mustard powder
80 grams butter - diced
3/4 cup buttermilk*
1 cup strong cheese, grated (Cheddar is best. Parmesan is also good.)
extra flour to dust ledge
*If you can't obtain buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk, stirred with 2 teaspoons white vinegar.
Topping
15 grams butter - melted
3 tblsp whole grain mustard
1/2 cup extra cheese
Essential Equipment
Small scone cutter (>2 inches diameter)
Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees C.
Mix the topping ingredients together in small bowl.
Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the dry ingredients. Cut the butter into the flour with a knife, and use your fingertips to work the butter into the flour, working quickly until you have a bowl of fine crumbs, without any loose unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl.
Add the buttermilk and stir gently with a spoon until the mixture is just congealed and no further.
Note: There is no yeast or extra baking powder in this recipe - scones require a delicate touch to preserve the springiness of the dough, otherwise they will come out of the oven like rocks and knives will not avail you.
Accordingly, turn the scone mixture onto a lightly floured surface and with your hands, form the dough into a mound and knead lightly. Bring the dough together, flatten it down, turn it over - for no more than a minute perhaps, until the dough is springy and one defined mass. If the dough is wet and refusing to form, add flour a spoonful at a time until the dough coalesces.
Spread a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray. Press dough gently until about an inch in thickness. Starting at the edge, wasting none of the dough (the less re-kneading and reforming of scraps you do, the better!) cut small scones. One by one, cut and lay on the tray.
Spread the tops of the scones with the topping recipe.
Bake at 220C for 9-12 minutes, until they are risen and lightly golden on top, but not scorched.
Back in 2012 I did some physiotherapy at the Clinica Alemana for something extremely boring and muscle-related. Things were silly there. Recently, the something boring and muscle-related returned and I am back in physio again. During the year and a half since i was out of it, things have gotten sillier.
I started my course of treatment with an an evaluation with a physiotherapist. I arrived, I took a number and I waited to be called up. And eventually, I was.
"I have an evaluation today." I said. "At eleven o’clock. Name of Tabubilgirl.”
The receptionist looked at me strangely and tapped her computer keyboard. She pointed to a chair against the far wall and told me to go and sit. Obediently, I sat. And waited. And waited some more. After almost an hour, I heard my name -
“Tabubilgirl!” A woman cried. “Tanto tiempo! (It's been so long!) So good to see you! But-” and her face took on the same puzzled look the receptionist had worn – “What on earth are you doing here?”
I blinked. “I have an evaluation at eleven. With you.”
“But the receptionists called me yesterday to tell me you’d cancelled.”
“The receptionist called me yesterday to confirm!”
She squinted. “What time did they call you?”
“Around eleven?”
“They called me in the afternoon. You weren’t coming. They said you were very definite about it. So I filled your slot with someone else. But that person cancelled, so you got lucky.”
And I had my evaluation after all.
After the evaluation I went back out and took another number number and waited to speak to a receptionist to schedule times for my physio sessions.
“My physio said 9:30 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays." I said. "For six weeks."
“That’s complicated.” The receptionist said. “Let me write that down. What did you say your name was?” She turned over an invoice and wrote in pencil on the back 'Tuesday, 9:30. Thursday. 9:30. Saturday. 9:30.' Laboriously, she entered each one of the eighteen dates individually into the physiotherapy calendar, asking - and forgetting - my name and RUT (national ID) number for every single one.
On my left a young woman had arrived to sign in for a session. Her receptionist frowned at her. “You don't have a session today. You’re here for an evaluation. Have you ever been to the Clinica Alemana before?”
“I’ve been coming here for three weeks! My physiotherapist is inside waiting for me!”
“That’s impossible.” The receptionist said. “I have you down for an evaluation this morning. There are no other records-”
My receptionist cleared her throat. “I’ve entered all your dates.” She said. “Now you need to go downstairs to the main accounts department and pay.”
"Can't I pay here?"
"Of course not."
"But I just paid you for my evaluation."
"That's different."
I opened my mouth to ask why, but she scowled at me, so I went downstairs to the main accounts department and took a number and queued there for a while.
When I came back to Physiotherapy, my receptionist must have been feeling magnanimous, because she beckoned me right up to her desk and took the invoice from me with a pleased sigh.
“Now that’s done,” she said, “I can enter your hours in the computer. What did I do with that paper?” She fussed with the papers on the desk in front of her. “Tuesdays – and Thursday – and Wednesdays? No. Fridays? Where DID that bit of paper go?”
“Didn't you just put me in the computer?” I said.
“Not formally." She said. "That was only informally. Now I’ve got your invoice, I can put you in again. Formally. Starting next Tuesday, is that right? Tuesday at 9:30. And Thursday at 9:30. And Saturday at 9:30. And Tuesday at 9:30- This is complicated. I'd better write this down first.”
On my right, an elderly man was checking in for an evaluation.
“No you’re not.” His receptionist said. “You’re booked in for a session with Sandra. She’s waiting for you.”
“I don’t know any Sandra. I’m here for an evaluation.”
“Your evaluation was LAST Thursday. It’s right here in the computer-”
“But I’ve never BEEN here before-”
I left the Clinica smiling peaceably and feeling much better about the state of the universe.
Today I watched while a little white poodle stopped at a cross light next to a great big German shepherd. The little poodle attempted to make the acquaintance of the big dog, with all of the most polite wag-and-sniff etiquette that well intentioned little dog can show. But the Shepherd was wearing a great big opaque plastic cone of shame around his neck, and the little dog was so little that the big dog couldn’t see him.
He could hear him, wherever he was, and as the big dog turned his head from side to side, and turned himself around to see behind, and wagged his tail hopefully, and turned around again to try in front to see if the mysterious other dog had gone around the other way while his back was turned, the little dog trotted along right behind him, padding desperately on his little poodle legs and remaining perpetually in his blind spot.
Around and around and around, two willing dogs running in circles and never ever going to meet. Chuffing with bewilderment, the big dog shook his head in his great big plastic cone and gave up. He straightened himself out and shook his head and trotted away up the block, and the little dog sat down and cried.
Mr Tabubil's mother is wonderful. When our lease on our rental apartment ran out with our new apartment still a gutted shell, she smiled as we took over her apartment with our boxes and bags, and she fired up the BBQ and baked apple pies to keep us both in fighting trim. She came apartment hunting, she came tile shopping, paint shopping, appliance shopping - willing to drop everything and anything to lend me her opinion or a firm supportive arm. She stood behind me when I needed moral support, quietly acting as my second guess and sanity check. Was I legitimately upset? Was this really happening? Should I be mad or had I lost all perspective - and possibly my mind?
Always she was there there, with a firm nod of "Yes. Stand your ground. Kitchen plumbing is not optional - nor are front doors - and walls are meant to stand up straight. I promise you they are."
About a week after the new flooring was installed, there was a day where I couldn’t be on site. Mr Tabubil took over my agenda - he had a couple of sub-contractors to pay, and a delivery time to nail down with the people who’d sold us our stove. Easy as pie.
That evening I was in the kitchen making sandwiches with my mother-in-law. The front door slammed and Mr Tabubil came crashing in – banging doors and thumping his feet and generally throwing an absolute tantrum.
The stove people had been intolerable, he shouted. He waved his hands a lot and stamped his feet -
Firstly, they'd told him that the store manager had cancelled the delivery because we hadn't paid on time.
"What delivery?!” He’d said. “And what do you mean we haven't paid on time? There was no time! I'm here to schedule a delivery. I’ve got the receipt for payment right here - I’m here to make a time!”
At that, apparently, the stove people had gotten personal. Rather in the same vein as the man from the flooring company. And Mr Tabubil was infuriated. Because this was ridiculous! Who behaves like that?! All he’d wanted to do was schedule a damned delivery!
It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. The poor man was stamping up and down the kitchen, waving his arms at the light fixtures and literally vibrating with rage, and instead of sympathizing, I found myself shaking with laughter. I looked over at my mother-in-law. Her eyes were bright and she was making little fizzing noises - and squeaking through her nose, whenever he turned his back.
Mr Tabubil roared and stamped away into the living room. My mother-in-law and I grabbed each other by the shoulders and we rocked back and forth, crying with laughter. It was tremendous.
Mr Tabubil thumped his way back into the kitchen, looked at us in disbelief and opened his mouth- and my mother-in-law shouted "Yes! That's right! One more, Mr Tabubil! A big one! All together now- AGGRRRRGGGGHHHHH!"
And Mr Tabubil gaped at her and said "This is serious!"
"Yes!" She cried. "I know! I've been there when it's all happening! I've seen Tabubilgirl come home every day! This is exactly what it's like!"
She and I looked at each other and we were off again, laughing like loons. It was massively liberating, seeing things from the other side of the mirror.. But mostly I just laughed and laughed. It was too terribly funny.
And then I made the poor man a sandwich. His blood sugar was low.
You can blame the cats. We hadn't planned to replace the floors in the bedrooms when we renovated the place. Yes, the carpets were a little manky-looking, but manky-looking is okay, isn't it? We'd give them a good shampoo and replace them with wooden floors a year or so down the line. The budget wasn't infinite, y'know?
Our contractor Rodrigo pressed his lips together and said absolutely nothing.
It was when the rest of the apartment had been gutted and its floors and walls and furnishings hauled out to the skip, that we began to smell the Smell. It was a deep, rich, feline stench that seemed to spread and to strengthen hourly. In the bedrooms the stains in the corners of the carpet blurred and twisted in our tearing vision, stretching out long wavering arms of Smell and reaching up to grab us by the throat.
It was cats. Twenty years of cats, to be precise. Twenty years of incontinent cats on a carpet that had never been once washed or wiped, or toweled dry - twenty years of incontinent cats who'd made themselves favorite places in the corners of carpets, and the lower reaches of what had once been drywall - and was now a crumbling font of rich ammonical reek -
Our contractor moved in with crowbars, and I went out and bought floors.
I found good floors. Sturdy and solid and shining, from a firm that positively wallowed in positive affirmations, and which offered me a complete installation for a very good price.
Everything was sunshine and roses right up to the day of installation - when it turned out that things had gone ever so slightly wrong.
The floors had been delivered, all right, but not to us. After the initial irate telephone call of "What the heck did you do with the wood we delivered yesterday? The installation boys are here and say you're hiding it on us!" the company became very cagey on the subject. Persistent questioning disclosed that the delivery crew had knocked on the door of an entirely different apartment in an entirely different building at the entirely opposite end of Santiago, and an enterprising somebody had said "why yes, I am Tabubilgirl" and signed for it on the spot.
I don't know whether she ended up keeping it, but an entirely brand new load of flooring arrived at our address the two days later, and we never ever mentioned it again.
I was gifted with two strong young men to do the installation. They were apprentices and it was apparently their first week on the job, but they swore that the supervisor's arrival was imminent. Really. Double-swear, and they wouldn't touch so much as a hammer until he came to show them what to do. Double-triple-pinkie-swear, really.
They had sincerity in their eyes, and I had invoices for laundry sinks and hot water heaters to pay, so just imagine my surprise when I came back two and a half hours later and found the job almost complete, with no supervisor in sight.
The installation had gone iffily. The two young men had a decent grasp of right angles and appeared to know how to use a saw, but their technical knowledge had clearly been exhausted before they got to the complexities of the hammer. I'm not claiming any superiority of technique, but when I hold a hammer, instead of dialing in the location of the blow by approximates and test swings, generally I aim for the nail.
Our brand new rooms looked like they'd been ground zero for a convention of clog-dancers rehearsing for the annual stub-toe all-comers.
"Are you going to replace the floor?"
"No."
"Can you give me a reason why not?"
"Because we won't."
And that, apparently, was that. After a conversation that was extremely unsatisfactory on all sides, phone calls happened, and I got the opportunity to deliver lines like:
"I would like to have a reasonable discussion on the subject, one that consists of more than "I can't', 'its not possible', and 'Its not my fault'. At present we are not having that conversation."
My delivery was splendid - strong and outraged, with hint of fragile wobble and tears. And it only took the company three weeks to get back to me.
Pro tempore, we were building bedroom closets. The basic infrastructure had gone up before the new floors went in, but the shelves and the drawers needed building, and our cabinet maker swore black blue and sideways that the only possible place in which to build them was right next to the closets themselves, ("as close as possible for measuring purposes," he said) right in the middle of the brand new master-bedroom floor.
I offered him the living room. He looked at me scathingly and whistled between his teeth. I insisted on the living room, and helped him out by picking a load of saw-edged fiberboard and carrying it out of the bedroom. He went home early in a fit of pique and when I got to the apartment the next morning, I found he'd beat me by half an hour. He was back in the bedroom, sawing merrily away - bits of fiberboard clattering off of the end of the sawhorse and bouncing off the (formerly) varnished floor.
While I waited for Rodrigo to arrive, we compromised on a layer of cardboard to cover the floorboards and a dropcloth on top of that, but when I came back from inspecting the installation of countertops in what might someday be the kitchen, the dropcloth had been rudely pushed to the side of the room and the cardboard wasn't anywhere. The carpenter was hammering now, the spent nails pinging gaily off the floorboards, where occasionally, they stuck.
Words were had.
"Don't worry about it." Rodrigo said when he arrived. "I'll talk to him. He'll keep the dropcloth. But don't worry so much - he doesn't want to hurt anything. He's a careful worker. How much damage could there be?"
Every morning I put that dropcloth down, and every morning it went away - pushed away, scuffed away, dragged away - tools were lost under it, nails were kicked under it, claw-hammers were dropped on it, the claw-points facing down-
Rodrigo, staring glumly at the mess, said that he'd be happy to go fifty-fifty for a new floor if the flooring company ever called back. And I began cataloging scratches with post-it stickers. I was keeping score.
While writing this piece, at this point I stepped away from the computer and went to find Mr Tabubil.
"I'm writing about the floor." I said. "And I don't know if I should be writing about it. Who's going to believe me? After everything else I've written about this renovation, I feel I'm at a point where the only sensible reaction a reader can have is to say I'm making it all up."
Mr Tabubil giggled. "You do have to admit-"
"I know." I said. "It's ridiculous. I've been going through my email and phone records - even I hadn't remembered how ridiculous the whole thing was. Do you remember how when I finally did get through to the flooring company, and they told me that it the situation was entirely my fault? I hadn't said what sort of installation I wanted. I hadn't said I wanted nice."
Mr Tabubil burst out laughing.
"Seriously! I got angry, and eventually they agreed to send a man to look at the floors - and when he did, he arrived two hours before schedule and called me on the telephone, screaming and shouting and calling me the most vile names- and when my voice began to shake, he stopped yelling and very calmly told me that since I had failed to show up for our meeting, any possible consideration of any hypothetical damage was off.
And when Rodrigo found me, holding the telephone and looking for someone to disembowel, he told me not to take it personally because it was only a regular business tactic."
"I remember that!" Mr Tabubil said.
"He's trying to intimidate you." Rodrigo told me. "Particularly because you're a woman - he knows he did a bad job, and he thinks if he can scare you enough, you'll go away." And I looked at him and lifted my hands and said "But Rodrigo, I will go away. I'm new in town. I'm just a gringo. I've got no contacts - I've got no networks - I've got no leverage - I've got no way to make them fix it."
And Rodrigo looked at me grimly and said "I might." and went away to make some phone calls and three days later it turns out that suddenly the company was going fifty-fifty with him on replacement floors, no argument, just like he wanted, and he wouldn't say a single word about it. Only I went and did some investigating myself, and it turns out he just might have threatened the company with a city-wide boycott - a whole city full of contractors refusing to let any of their clients use that company for their flooring. All for three new bedroom floors in a little apartment in Providencia. Nobody is going to believe a word of it!"
Mr Tabubil whooped. "Nobody in North America is going to believe a word of it! But write it anyway. Everyone in Chile will know exactly what you're talking about."
So here's how it went:
On the day of the new installation, I was out shopping in the city. I didn't want to know, and I didn't want to care. Mr Tabubil decided that someone ought to. He told his boss he was working from home that day and took his laptop over to the new flat to watch the show -
Around about 11, my cell phone rang.
"I don't want to hear it." I said.
"You do," he said earnestly, "you really do. Guess who the flooring company sent over to install the new floors?" And he giggled.
"You're not serious."
"Yup." He said, and giggled again. "They sent the same two idiots who laid it the first time. Rodrigo is… sort of upset. Listen -" he stopped talking, and in the background of the call I could hear roaring.
"I" I said, "Am going to go eat ice-cream. And maybe watch a movie."
And I hung up.
The Santiago spring might be mostly made of Platano Orientale, but the city has more than a few golden poppies as well.
There’s a lovely story about how the copa de oro poppy came to Chile:
When news of the California Gold Rush arrived in Chile in 1849, thousands of Chileans went north to try their luck on the gold fields. The sailors that carried them deserted their ships and left their captains stranded in San Francisco, scrabbling for sailors to take them home.
These ships, returning empty to Chile, brought poppy seeds with them, mixed up with the stones they used for ballast in their empty holds. Unusually considerate for an invasive species, the poppy hadn’t much interest in virgin Chilean wilderness. It preferred earth already broken by humans, and spreading inland from the coast, made its way across cultivated fields and along road and railway lines, right across the central valley, all the way up into the foothills of the Andes. It was Chile’s first shipment of California Gold.
The truth is far more prosaic. The California poppy came to Chile all across the second half of the 19th century mixed up in Shipments of Alfalfa. Christened Copa de Oro (cup of gold), the golden poppy found a dry Mediterranean climate extraordinarily similar to its native California, and burst out everywhere all at once. Ironically, in some lights, the climate of Central Chile seems far more suited to the Copa de Oro than California. The plants spread further, grow larger and when they get going in spring, bloom bigger - pervasive to the point that to the point that many Chileans today presume that it’s a native. In spring, the short green plants bust out in flowers, drifts of gold and electric-orange blossoms carpeting the valleys and ridges and hills of Central Chile, turning their faces up to follow the sun.
A plant like the Copa de Oro deserves rather better than an ignominious origin in a sack of alfalfa. Let’s go with Californian gold.
Santiago does an awfully pretty spring. We’ve got jacaranda trees that bloom purple on every block, dropping pools of purple color on the streets beneath them and casting pools of purple shadow all around them on the sidewalks. We’ve got Ceibo – the original burning bush, with its small spring leaves blotted out by scarlet pods like clouds of hanging red flame. We’ve got wisteria hanging over walls, heavy and honey scented. We’ve got bright golden Californian poppies, spreading thick across the verges and the hills -
But most of all we’ve got the Platano Orientale.
A plátano is, in direct translation to the Spanish, a banana, but the Platano Orientale has nothing tropical or edible about it. It is the Eastern or Oriental Plane Tree - once beloved of Hippocrates, and today equally beloved of Santiago’s municipal councils. Tall and spreading, with a leaf rather like that of a maple, it grows like a weed, spreading up and out to make shady green tunnels of our hot summer city roads. And twice in every spring and early summer, it sprouts a crop of fluffy brown pods, which launch themselves on the summer breezes and inundate Santiago. The air fills up like a glass bowl full of dandelion clocks. Walking down the street is like walking through a storm of ash, thick and furry. On windy days, sheets of platano seeds come drifting across the sidewalks, piling up in gutters, and snagging in trees and bricks and paving stones.
Platano seeds get everywhere. They filter under window -frames and blow through keyholes . They catch in your zippers and your pockets and you trouser cuffs, and they catch in your eyes – which weep, and in your nose, which itches, and in your throat, where it lands on your tonsils with a shock like a live electrical wire. And then you cough – a terrible, barking electric cough. You cough and you cough and you cough you cough – bent double, helpless and weeping -
My first spring here, I spent three days in the hospital after that terrible electric cough met my outgrown childhood asthma and brought it all back in full liquid-lung terror. There’s an awful lot of asthma in Santiago. It’s not just the pollution – and Chile produces smog like it’s the mainstay of the GDP. It’s the way the spring belongs to the Platano Orientale.
Mr Tabubil, who has never known an allergy in his life, succumbed within weeks of arriving, and passes the spring red-rimmed and hacking. My Dad, equally hardy, visited us last spring, and half-way across a traffic intersection, he stopped dead in the road and doubled over with that terrible electric cough, locked in an attack that required every instrument in my mobile asthma arsenal to bring under control.
And I have quite the arsenal. Since being released from the hospital, spring comes pre-loaded with an arsenal of sprays and drops and inhalers that would make a hardened hypochondriac blush. Our municipalities might love the Platano Orientale, but every doctor I’ve met would, given half an opportunity and an illicit batch of Agent Orange, defoliate the whole city in one fell swoop if it would get rid of That Tree. Medical committees, armed with infographics and statistics, make eloquent claims on the public interest and the public health. They bring in experts on horticulture and respiratory medicine. They drag in respiratory patients for dramatic personal narratives. But the platano grows like a weed in poor soil, and when have sense and logic ever prevailed against a budget-minded municipality anywhere?
And doctors talk darkly, in surgeries and over cocktails, of axes in the dark.
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