Leftovers

We’re still eating turkey.

Best Beloved left for Nicosia Monday morning, having eaten turkey in every meal (including breakfast) since Christmas lunch. “No, don’t give me any to take with me,” he said as he fled to his car at seven on Monday morning. “I think I’ve had enough!”

My family had a tradition of naming our turkeys. When we lived in London in the Sixties, my mother used to name them after film stars. “Bake well,” she’d say. “Gina!” -- or, Brigitte, Elizabeth, Marilyn, Zsa Zsa. My father had a trademark recipe that he made every year for the family and to give as presents – uncooked cranberry sauce flavoured with orange. I remember racy jokes about large-breasted turkeys and ‘plenty of sauce’– though I didn’t understand them then.

In this PC era, such names and jokes would be deemed outrageously sexist; worse, by far, than giving hurricanes only female names. Maybe next year I’ll stick Brad in the oven. Or George.

Maybe not. ‘Cold George with gravy’ doesn’t have the same ring as ‘A bite of Brigitte with sauce’. Consider me irreparably damaged by my upbringing.

But I digress. I have been cooking leftovers for the last four days: turkey soup with egg and lemon (boil up the carcass for 1.5 litres of stock, then remove the bones and add a palm of rice per person. Whisk 2 eggs with the juice of 2 lemons, and when the rice is cooked add a little of the broth to the egg-lemon mixture. Add more, whisking well. Then a little more. Finally add the egg/lemon/broth mixture to the rest of the stock, whisking constantly so that the eggs don’t curdle. Add shredded turkey meat and enjoy with a sprinkling of black pepper.), mushrooms and turkey cooked in a wine and cream sauce, toasted turkey and brie sandwiches, turkey with pesto, turkey omelette, turkey fried with halloumi... Reeling off the menu I feel a little like Bubba in the movie Forrest Gump telling Forrest all the ways that he knew to cook shrimp.

I estimate that only one day of turkey leftovers remains. Five days’ eating’s not bad for thirty-three euros, but I doubt I'd ever choose a bird that big for only family again -- at least not until the Littles become teens.

I am my Father’s Daughter (or The Saga of our Christmas Turkey)

My father did not grow up poor, but his father did. My dad grew up in Depression-era St Louis, the son of a dirt-poor man from Tennessee who had gone to the city and had some lucky breaks, but imbued in his son and daughter a life-long thriftiness that somehow combined with true generosity of spirit. I remember seeing my father build and repair tools rather than buying them, and he enjoyed a life-long quest for the Special Offer.

*****

A couple of weeks ago, Best Beloved and I had our usual Christmas discussion about whether we would have a turkey or a goose for Christmas lunch.

“Turkey, Manamou!” he finally decided. “But not from Pepa (a village woman from whom we’ve bought turkeys for the last few years). She’s been getting greedy. Order a free-range one from the frozen shop.”

So I ordered a free-range bronze English turkey that would arrive fresh on the 23rd and be available for collection any time up ‘til lunch on Christmas Eve.

Yesterday I went to collect it at about nine. “Name?” asked the owner, a middle-aged English Cypriot whom I’ll call Charlie. I told him and his frown of worry deepened.

He went to the ‘fridge, scanned the tags on the two remaining birds, and came back to the desk looking tense. “Are you sure you ordered?”

“Yes,” I told him. “And you wrote it in the book.” Together we pored over the pages until we came to my name. “Ah!” he said with a smile of relief. “I misread the name as ‘Bachelor’! Now…” He launched into an explanation of how the other shop had mistakenly taken one of his turkeys and left him a fresh bird short “So, you could have this 7 kilo frozen defrosted one for half-price, if you want, and your fresh one will go to So-and-So… Or, of course you can have your slightly smaller fresh one at 12.50 a kilo...(And I'll find some other sucker to take the defrosted mammoth off my hands.)”

“When was it defrosted?” I asked.

“The girl in the other shop took it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge yesterday morning.”

He brought it down and my heart sank when I saw the price tag. How could someone pay 83 Euros for a turkey? I thought. Why didn’t I just get one from the supermarket instead of opting for this ludicrously expensive bird? “See, your fresh one is smaller,” Charlie said. It would have been 76 Euros.

I thought for a minute. “But this one is frozen, so are you offering it to me at half the price of a fresh one – which would be 6.25 a kilo – or half the price of a frozen one which would be less?”

“You’re a hard woman!” he said, throwing up his hands. “OK. A frozen one’s 10 Euros a kilo, so at half-price this one would be 33.”

We opened the plastic pack and smelled it. It smelled good.

“You’ve got a deal,” I said. “But if I die from food poisoning, I want a big wreath – a massive wreath,full of flowers and ribbons – at my funeral.”

”If you die,” Charlie answered. “I’m right behind you, because my family’s eating the same thing tomorrow.”

We laughed together. “OK, we’ll party in heaven,” I told him.

“You’re going there?” he asked, raising both bushy eyebrows. “OK, but I doubt that I am – and I don’t think they do very good parties there, anyway.”

“Further south, then,” I told him laying cash on the barrelhead and walking to the door with my prize. “It’s a deal!”

*****

I was a bit nervous recounting the story to Best Beloved later. “What if he thinks I did the wrong thing and endangered all of us for the sake of 50 lousy Euros?” But born of cash-wise peasant stock, my husband had no such qualms. “You got the ultimate Special Offer, Manamou,” he said with a grin. “Happy Christmas! Colonel Jim would be proud.”

School Christmas Party

Friday was the Big Ones’ school Christmas Dance. Like last year it was held in the Aliathon Hotel, tickets 25 Euro a shot, 7.30 to 11.30, buffet dinner and DJ. The few days leading up included a flurry of shopping. “I’ve got to have shoes, Mama!” “I need black jeans that fit and a red tie!” “How do I clean my skate shoes?” (Answer: “You don’t – ya gotta buy a new pair of shoes..”)

Fortunately, Sophia fits into my clothes and had no wish to buy anything new as I had found her dress several months ago.

Thirteen and a half years ago, when she was just a baby, we went out to Hawaii to visit my father. Strolling through the Ala Moana centre one day, infant in arms and toddler in tow, Best Beloved and I stopped in front of a dress shop.

“That would look lovely on you, Manamou!” he said, pointing to a reddish, slinky number on a manneqin. “Go and try it on.” I did, and it hung awkwardly, but when I tried on the smaller one, despite hugging my various bulges, it looked better.

“I’ll be losing those soon, anyway,” I said to myself. “I’ll get the small.”

The price tag of $369 made me wince a little – this was over a decade ago, and that seemed a lot to me for a dress – but I bought it…

…And never wore it. Never even removed the tags. About 4 years ago I tried it again, realised that I had grown even more bulges that I would never lose, and took it to the Dogs and Cats charity shop.

Last summer, flicking through the dress racks in the Cancer Patients’ charity shop, a familiar reddish tinge caught my eye. There was my dress – with the tags from Ala Moana still attached.

I bought it for a Euro and it fit Sophia perfectly.

My Children Sing in the Car.

Probably everybody’s do – and I know that when my siblings and I were young, we used to sing often – in the car and anywhere else, heedless of wrong notes, mistaken words, and variable keys. But hearing Zenon and Leo sing song after song – in Greek and English – during a twenty-minute car journey is one of my almost daily blessings.

And I don’t ask them to. One will start, and the other will join in – their voices generally true, even for children of nine and seven. Usually they sing songs learned at school – traditional Greek or Cypriot ballads or patriotic songs. Occasionally they sing pop songs, and Zenon has acquired a taste for soft rock, so that between glorifying the heroes and martyrs of 1821, he will launch into ‘Desperado’ – often with very strange words as he hasn’t managed to figure out what the lyrics are and just adds his own approximation.

He also has a liking for ‘Eye of the Tiger’, but fortunately his rendition only occasionally figures in the repertoire. Lately he and Leo have learned the words to ‘Jolene’ thanks to someone’s leaving a CD in my car. Both Zenon and Leo have picked up not only the lyrics, but Dolly’s accent, too. The other day Best Beloved pulled out of the drive on the way to town, and drifting back down the drive came ‘Ah had t’have this toke with you, mah happiness depends on you…’ A day or two later, apropos of nothing, Zenon suddenly said “What’s a toke, Mama?”

Alex has a true voice as well, and will often sing with me: our repertoire ranges from Kathy Mattea’s ‘Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses’ to Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat out of Hell’ complete with motorcycle sound effects. He has an instinctive ear for harmony, so we do quite well together.

Sophia is more inclined to join Celine Dion or the Dixie Chicks when she’s listening to them on her computer. Unfortunately it’s hard to persuade her that her singing with headphones on means that we get a tuneless drone – she just shrugs when we stand in front of her pointing at the headphones and wincing.

She is the one who most wants to be able to sing well, as she has hopes for the stage. But people ‘in the know’ have told her that an ability to sing and dance gives one a better chance of acceptance into acting school, and a good drama school is practically pre-requisite for a stage career. She has started learning to play the guitar, and I have been trying to explain basic theory. But “I don’t want lessons!” she insists. “That’s the quickest way possible to put me off music.” Unfortunately my knowledge is very limited, and if she applies herself as I know that she can, she may be looking for lessons within the next year or so as she realises that self-teaching can take her only so far.

Now that Christmas is around the corner, we are regaled by a range of carols. Rudolf (in both English and Greek) is reindeer non grata, and I’ve threatened to put a boot through the Little Drummer Boy’s instrument if I hear of it again (never liked that carol!), but the house and the car are full of ‘Jingle Bells’ – often including the parody ‘Batman smells’), Silent Night, and Greek and Cypriot seasonal songs.

It’s good to be surrounded by music.

Soldier Boy

Best Beloved just finished his annual army service for 2009. Conscription is mandatory here, and every July a crop of shaven-head eighteen-year-old males is herded off to the various training camps to spend the next two years running up hills, playing about in tanks, splashing around in rubber boats and guarding the Green Line from the 40,000 Turkish regulars who still squat in the northern 40% of Cyprus.

After their two years, all men have to do a regular reserve duty (most keeping their kit, service rifle, and ammunition at home) – the younger ones for several weeks a year, the older ones gradually tapering off their number of days until they reach their fiftieth birthday when they are assigned to Home Guard units.

Best Beloved did his army service as a Lt quartermaster in an armoured reconnaissance unit back in the early eighties. He hated most of it, but was a good shot and still loves weapons. When he came back from finishing college and work in the UK, he didn’t report to the police for Army Service, and after about a year they went to his parent’s house to ask where he was. His mother gave them our address, and shortly afterwards, they showed up at the door.

“Why on earth couldn’t you say that you didn’t know where I was?” he asked her.

“It was the police, son. And for your Army Duty! I couldn’t lie about that…”

“Thanks, Ma. Send me back to the tanks!”

The Army descended on him with glee, sent him to do another officer course, and ordered him to spend a couple of days a year at war games. When he began travelling regularly for work, they downgraded him until now he is out of his old unit and only has to report one day of the year.

So around December 1 each year, he dons his (too tight) camouflage and trundles off to base to play soldiers with the other forty-somethings who are too old for much and too young for Dad’s Army. They sit around and drink coffee and clamber into a five-ton truck for a shooting session before heading back to their city offices.

Last year he forgot. Missing your Army Duty makes you liable for a fine, but someone must have signed him in, because when he arrived today (“Don’t forget to remind me on Tuesday that I have to go to the Army, Manamou!” – but of course I forgot) no one said a word about it.

I just phoned him.

“I’m back at the office now,” he said. “But we were all saying that we need the chiropractor. Climbing into those trucks without a ladder is a bit beyond most of us now, and bumping over the tracks is a little hard on bones more accustomed to a Mercedes. The trucks’ll kill us before the Turks ever get a chance!”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Fired ten bullets.”

“Did you hit the target?”

“Well according to me I did – you can tell when your hitting it. But the bloke who was reading our scores really didn’t give a damn – he was just saying whatever came into his head. We could tell because the guy standing next to me always hits a near perfect score and so do I, but they told us both a silly number that didn’t mean anything, so we figured that they didn’t really care.”

Oh, it’s good to feel so well protected!

Back to the Dentist

“Mummy, my tooth hurts,” Leo told me last night after brushing. “The same one that Doctor C filled.”

I looked in his mouth, saw nothing wrong, and said “Ok. Well let me know if it gets any worse and I will make an appointment for you with Doctor Lenia tomorrow.”

I half-expected him to wake me last night, but he didn’t, and except for saying that it still hurt a little this morning, complained no more. Nevertheless, as soon as the surgery opened this morning I was on the phone to Lenia’s receptionist. She gave Leo an appointment for 11.45 today, and I arranged with the school to pick him up early.

As soon as she touched the tooth, she tightened her lips and shook her head. “When I see cases like this, of a baby tooth with decay, I never fill,” she told me. “I tell the parents to make sure that the child brushes well, and we keep a very close eye on it. Drilling a tooth like this can push the decay deep inside. Then the filling caps it, the bacteria multiply, and you get an infection like this.

“You have two options,” she continued. “We can prescribe antibiotics and kill the infection, but that will probably be only a temporary measure. He does not shed this tooth for another four years, and you could be looking at successive infections. Or we can take it out.”

I could, she told me, avoid antibiotics altogether if I wanted to use Propolis, “But it will take longer.” Leo has never had antibiotics – strange for a Cypriot child, paediatricians hand them out left, right, and centre – but I reach for them when there is a need, so I asked her to fill one and she gave us Amoxycillin for the bacteria and Nurofen for the pain.

“Once the infection is gone, we can do the extraction,” she said. “I don’t like it, and I wish that it weren’t necessary, but I think that it’s the only way to go.”

We made an appointment for next Tuesday, and Leo skipped out of the office, running smack into Kay in the waiting room. She had come to have a filling and was not looking forward to it, so we kept her company until her name was called, then headed for the car.

“Will it hurt?” Leo asked on the way home, and I explained about injections “like the one Zenon had which made his mouth feel really strange,” and said that it would be a little uncomfortable later. “But I’ll be with you all the time, and we can get a treat afterward.”

He seemed satisfied with that.

Armistice Day Baby

Eighty-three years – almost to the hour – after the guns stopped roaring, the gas stopped seeping and the great curtain of mud and steel that had bisected Europe from Switzerland to the sea had ceased to seethe, Leo, my last-born, made his appearance.

I have an Armistice Day baby. He was not born on ‘Remembrance Sunday’ – the closest Sunday to November 11 – when the Queen bends her knee before the Cenotaph to honour her fallen soldiers; nor on Veterans Day – the nearest Monday – when the Americans take a day off for barbeques and Super Sales to remember their veterans, living and dead. No, Leo arrived on The Day itself: a day that for as long as I can remember, I have marked with a silence at eleven o’clock. When I was little, the ranks of the red-coated Chelsea Pensioners still included veterans of the trenches, but now that Harry Patch has passed on and the Great War – in England at least – has passed from living memory to history, their ranks are filled with other men and women, but the number of families touched by continuing conflicts is continuing to grow by the day.

***

But there was no two minutes of silence for me in 2002 – not at eleven, anyway.

For the last few weeks of my pregnancy, Leo had been breech presentation (feet down), or lying sideways. On November 10, Best Beloved had left for London and the World Travel Market, and Doctor Michalis, my ob-gyn had warned me “Any pains and you come straight in. I’ll do a breech delivery with you because this is not your first baby and we know each other well, but a baby lying transverse cannot be born and will require a Caesarian.”

Fortunately, on the morning of the eleventh, I felt Leo turn around, and was in the English Butcher, half-way up the Mesoyi hill, when the first dragging pain told me that today would be the day. “Looks like you’ll be having your baby soon,” Rose smiled at me from behind the counter. “Actually,” I gasped. “He’s on his way now!”

It wasn’t the first time that I had driven myself while in labour, but I hope it was the last… Kay was at home with Zenon, then two. She called Lise who picked up Alex and Sophia from school and contacted Barbara, a friend who was going to help Kay look after Lise’s and my combined children because Lise was coming with me to take care of Sophia who wanted to be at her brother’s birth. Kay also called Jude, a midwife friend who had agreed to act as my ‘doula’ or birthing assistant (something unknown in Cyprus) throughout the delivery.

All these ‘additional extras’ to Leo’s birth are testament to Doc Michalis’ unusual temperament. Not only was he willing to deliver a breech presentation with me, he agreed to letting Jude be present, as well as Lise (though he knew them both well – Jude in her capacity as a midwife and Lise as a patient), and he sanctioned Sophia’s presence, although he insisted on a letter from a child psychologist saying that in her professional opinion, Sophia’s witnessing the normal delivery of a sibling would not cause her harm. He also allowed me to dispense with a shave, an enema, and a drip – all normal birth procedures in Cyprus.

Everyone duly arrived and the house began to bustle with eight children, two baby-sitters, and two carers. Jude dosed me with Rescue Remedy “To reduce trauma” and massaged me with essential oils of clary sage and frankincense “The first one to totally bliss you out and the second to induce stronger contractions”, she said.

Lise drove us to the hospital where our arrival, just as labour was beginning to accelerate, caused quite a stir at the Well Woman reception. The nurse showed us to our room, Doc Michalis checked me out (“Not long now”), someone thought to call Best Beloved (“I thought it wasn’t ‘til next week!”), and within an hour or so, I was moved upstairs to the delivery room.

“If you want to watch, Sophia,” Doc Michalis said. “Come and stand behind me.” So Sophia, one little hand in Lise’s, took up station at his shoulder, her eyes growing wider and wider as the top of Leo’s head began to appear. “Is that his brains?” she whispered. “No,” Lise whispered back. “That’s his dark curly hair… Look… the rest of him’s coming now!” And with a slippery wriggle, the rest of him arrived. Doc Michalis caught him with the ease of a thousand other births, and after cutting the cord and wrapping him in a cloth, handed him to his six-year-old sister.

“Well, that was easy,” the doctor said, putting a stitch into a small tear (99% of births in Cyprus include routine episiotomy – a cut to enlarge the vagina and make delivery ‘easier’ – Doc Michalis had promised me that he would avoid cutting me, and he did). “We’ll do the next one at home, shall we?”

“No next one, Doc,” I answered. “I know where these little buggers come from now!” Smiles all round. Home births do not happen here, yet.

***

We had Leo’s seventh birthday party on the Sunday before the eleventh – ‘Remembrance Sunday’. Fifteen children came and played traditional games like Pass the Parcel, Musical Chairs, and Pin the Tail on the Horse. We ate sandwiches and cake, jelly and pies, and when the last cars pulled away began the clean-up: dishes in the machine, paper in the bin, toys downstairs to the bedroom. A little boy went to sleep tired but happy that night.

Yesterday, the eleventh, I taught my second Organic Principals for the Backyard Gardener workshop at Lise’s Turtle and Moon studio in Trimithousa. At eleven, I was in full spate, explaining the workings of compost and mulch.

But at one, eleven GMT, I was on the road home. I pulled over for my two minutes of silence and wondered why I hadn’t said something during the class. Was I being Politically Correct? (“Don’t mention the War!”) My (two) students were, after all, English – brought up in the same tradition that I had been. Britain is now losing soldiers at an ever-increasing rate in Afghanistan, and thirty years ago, when we were all children, not pausing for the silence at eleven would have been inconceivable.

That’s something to think about for next year.