Sunday 26th October – I am not an earth mother I am a very naughty girl

I made the fatal mistake of watching Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and his Autumnal doings last night.  The thing is, I love Hugh. I really do.  He is the kind of foodie Ray Mears.  No he doesn’t whittle his own chopping boards out of random trees, but he does know a thing or two about making beetroot icecream.  I have been a devotee of Hugh ever since the early days when he trundled round the country chowing down on fish he’d hooked out of lakes near power stations wrapped in second hand newspaper and cooked on the engine of his car.  Admittedly I didn’t want to go round to his house for dinner as much then as I do now, but you get the idea.  Hugh and I have been linked spiritually for quite some time now.

The problem with watching Hugh is that I get all these crazy ideas in my head.  I am, you see, very susceptible.  I read someone’s blog, I think ‘hmm! That’s a good idea.’ I pinch their idea and write about it.  I see a pair of shiny shoes in Vogue, I think; ‘Hmmm! Shiny’ and then sadly nothing happens, but I dream of owning the shoes (usually with Bruce Forsyth in them at the moment for some obscure reason I am not willing to look into), etc, etc.  It is a good job I don’t like horror films or I’d probably be wandering around the county casually sawing someone’s head off with a sharpened spoon laughing maniacally.

Consequently Hugh gives me ideas.  The last time Hugh gave me ideas was when I thought how easy he made the whole idea of growing vegetables and went into gro bags in a big way with the kids.  I blogged about it.  It was hell on earth. Our pumpkins never made it, a cat shat in the herb bag and I’ve never been able to look the perfectly respectable, nay flourishing, parsley in the eye since.  The only things we managed to grow lots of were courgettes, sun flowers and snails.  It was total bedlam from beginning to end and it made me cry secretly when nobody was watching.

This time he has made me want to grow stripey tomatoes and make home made vegetable soup.  This is fine. I make lots of soup.  I am a soup maker extraordinaire.  I never buy tinned soup, unless I fancy some Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup, which is so bizarre it cannot possibly be reproduced in nature and reminds me of being looked after when I was a child.  Somewhere there was this crazy idea that Lucozade and tins of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup were just what the doctor ordered when you were ill.  My mother was like Felicity Kendall on crack for large amounts of my childhood, and we never ate tinned soup at any other time, except when we were ill.  This now strikes me as extremely odd.  Why would you, when faced with a sickly child think: ‘Right! I’ll stop making everything fresh using our organically grown produce.  I shall instead purchase some fizzy orange liquid with a taste like nothing else on earth and a tin of this luminous orange concoction which has a shelf life of three thousand light years and feed that to my ailing child instead.’?

Anyway, I have now got this bee in my bonnet about making vegetable soup.  Considering the rapturous reception that my perfectly acceptable spicy tomato soup got on Friday you think I would give in to the inevitable and buy chips, instead donating the vegetables to the poor, but no. It has to be done.

My eldest daughter also has a thing about Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall.  She too watches his programmes and gets terribly excited about catching her own crayfish or growing turnips or whatever.  Considering she thinks vegetables are the work of the devil and panics if you put anything approximating what most people would consider a real meal in front of her I am fascinated by this.  She watched the soup making process with me last night and said: ‘I would eat that if you made it.’  I said: ‘Really?’ to which she replied: ‘Yes. It looks nice.’  I am writing this down verbatim by the way, not because it is a fascinating conversation on a par with the top witticisms of Winston Churchill at his most erudite, but because I want evidence when the inevitable furore takes place, later on today.

I said: ‘Great! Because I really fancy making that soup and I’m going to make some tomorrow.’  She said: ‘That would be brilliant.’  Then there was an almighty pause and she said: ‘How much of it will I have to eat?’ followed quickly by: ‘Are you sure you won’t be too tired to make it tomorrow?’  How solicitous!

This has made me more determined than ever to make it, even though I realise I am courting disaster and will inevitably end up wishing I had more of a mediterranean temperament so that I could throw bowls of soup at the wall with insouciance and not think: ‘No, I won’t do that because I will be the one having to clean it up later and that would be so bloody annoying it will just not be worth the effort.’  I am a fool to myself.

As for the tomato thing.  Occasionally you can get hold of different varieties of tomato, the stripey ones, the yellow and orange ones and the green ones.  They are lovely, much sweeter, more tart and tasty than boring old red ones, but they are very difficult to find.  I want to grow bushels and bushels of them and eat them all through the summer.  I have fantasies of taking gluts of them to the harvest festival and everyone being bowled over by my horticultural skill.  This of course is absolute bollocks.  I will undoubtedly get around to it just that fraction too late/early in the season.  The children will help and what we will end up with will be sticks of wilted mush surrounded by fat and gleeful birds and slugs.  The few paltry efforts we salvage will be poked with disgust by everyone but me and they will all consider it a huge punishment and moan incessantly, despite being all jolly about it when we are spending fifty quid on paraphernailia in the garden centre.

I blame Hugh and his siren like ways entirely.  If it weren’t for him and his alluringly mad haired ways I would be quite happy nipping off to Waitrose for some random veg and letting it fester in the bottom of the fridge like everyone else.  I am just not blessed with earth mother tendencies and the sooner Hugh realises it, the better it will be for all of us.

Maybe I will write him a letter…