On the shelves here at Lush Places are two fusty-smelling old books. One is a green contacts book. Its cover is faded and the edges battered. The other is an equally faded maroon recipe book. It has a chunk out of the spine.
When Elizabeth Jane, my pet ewe, was a lamb and allowed to gallop around the house, she pulled it off the shelf and attempted to eat it. Perhaps she thought there was a recipe for biscuits inside. She is partial to a biscuit.
You have to be really quite old to remember when the details inside address books and recipe books were painstakingly hand-written. I bought the green book when I got a job as a feature writer at the Herald. This was about a hundred years ago, when there were still jobs for that almost extinct species that is the journalist. I suppose at least I’m not yet extinct – or dead – although it can be only a matter of time.
There are a lot of dead people in my books. In the contacts book is Sir Patrick Hogan, who died last year. Hogan, who was worth many millions, offered me a bottle of water from his fridge. The bottles had “reduced to clear” stickers on them. I may have pointed this out. He wouldn’t have been surprised, he said, if I’d put the stickers on myself. “You’re a bugger of a woman,” he said. I took this as a tremendous compliment. He admired a bugger. His most successful horse, Sir Tristram, was a complete bugger of a thing his entire life.
Sir Howard Morrison liked to call me on a Friday at 4pm to tell me that he was in his PJs, having a curry and a glass of wine. He’d say: “Hello pet! Sir H here.” He was complicated and damaged, between worlds: Māori and Pākehā. He said: “Oh, I’ve probably brought a lot of it on myself for being a shit.” I loved him.
I have always loved a pretendedly dotty, very rich person. Dame Rosie Horton, the grand charity queen, also died last year. She knew absolutely fabulously how to be rich. She went to the hairdresser on Remmers Rd every morning to get a wash and a blow-dry for her blonde (dyed, of course) bob. At her Victoria Ave house she asked if I would like a cup of coffee. She wandered over to the coffee machine and looked at it as though she’d never seen it before. She managed to rustle up a cup of tea. It was the most disgusting cup of tea I’ve ever had. It tasted of boiled up old dish cloths.
There are various numbers for Paul Holmes. When you phoned him, he would say: “Can’t hear you. You’re breaking up.” Then he cracked up. Interviewing him involved a lot of chain-smoking. He seemed to love smoking and to loathe it. You wondered whether he felt the same way about himself. He complained that I was “a very prolonged experience”. He could have done our two-hour interview in 10 minutes. He was the one who banged on. He was bloody annoying, but also bloody funny.
The recipe book is another relic. Here is Rachel’s recipe for Carne de Porco à Alentejana, a Portuguese pork casserole with clams, which I must make again. Rachel died in 2015. A savarin with rum and apricot glaze? I must have been going through a pretentious cooking phase. Oxtail with bacon dumplings? This took three days to evolve. I must have been unemployed.
Here is Rebekah’s Best Chocolate Cake. Did I really crystallise violets to adorn it? Probably.
There is a recipe card from Rona, my adored step-grandmother, who cooked her Sunday lunch leg of lamb studded with rosemary and garlic. Her lamb was pink on the inside. This was in the 70s, when lamb was slaughtered twice, once at the works and then by being cooked to leather for hours. Rona’s recipe for red date cake is written in fountain pen, in her beautiful cursive script. These old books have become treasured time capsules, and eulogies.
