Jackie French February 2003 message

Oh, for a boring day.... we spent this morning helping a naked, bloody, disoriented man who wandered out of the gorge and past our house. The police and helicopter had been searching for him for days.

The police got lost getting here. Luckily the ambulance driver was local and knew the way; I'm still wheezing as I write this from racing up the mountain in the dust and frantically waving at the police cars. Anyway, the poor bloke is now safely on his way to hospital. It is incredibly rough country up there- great cliffs and winding gullies- a terrible place for him to be lost in, especially now when there is no water, and the days are baking and the nights so cold.

Too much has happened in the past month- every day seems to bring a new drama, as well as fires and drought. But we are still here, and I'm still writing - in between crises.

And Mothball's baby- Fuzzball- is bigger and furrier and no longer looks like a bald football with tiny legs. In fact she looks exactly like Mothball, but smaller- and much, much more timid!

A few of our tamer crises in fact have been wombat ones. Mothball suddenly decided to blame us for the drought and the fact that she was HUNGRY. So she attacked the back door. When I opened it to give her some food she charged in, kocked me flying, dived through the screen door to the kicthen.. .and Edward was laughing so hard he couldn't do anything to help.

Well, finally his giggles died down enough for him to call her out. Edward has grown up with wombats and when he makes his wombat noise they follow him. So he went 'gng gng gng' out the door, and Mothball padded after him obediently, and I followed them with Mothball's bowl of rolled oats and chopped carrot.

Mothball then took one look at my flowing skirt and leapt up, ripping it right down the back, so there I was holding my skirt up with a furious wombat leaping all about me and Edward so weak with laughter he had to lean on the pergola post.

So I've been feeding them all every night now- three and a half wombats, counting the baby, but Fuzzball is still too timid to come to the door with the other wombats. I give them great heaped bowls of food, but around 4 am Mothball feels peckish again. in the past week she has eaten three doors, two window sills, a wooden panel, two doormats, one gum boot, a wombat shaped doorknocker and charged through two screen doors. Our house is now barricaded with reinforcing mesh- I'm terrified she'll charge through a window and really hurt herself- and we look like we are trying to protect ourselves from very short burglars.

Hopefully one day it will rain, and there'll be grass again. Our only rain in the last year was on my birthday- most deserts get more than we have in the past year. But now even the large trees are dying, and what was grass is dust, and I think every animal from kilometres around heads here for the water we put out for them.

Other news

Just had a wonderful day with Year 3 at Melbourne Girl's Grammar (hi to any wombat lovers reading this!). And Diary of a Wombat keeps flying out of the shops as fast as copies can be printed.

What else? I've just finished writing Phredde and the Purple Pyramid, but that won't be out till Novemember, but keep an eye out for Big Burps, bare Bums and other bad mannered blunders- 106 tips for behaving absolutely perfectly. It's VERY funny, and will be out next month, then Valley of Gold. I've seen the first copy of that, and it looks truely beautiful.

And apart from that...please please please wish us all a nice, boring few weeks, with an incredible amount of rain!

Lots of love,

Jackie

ps The police have just called to say the bloke is in hospital, and will be alright, and thank goodness we found him as they were about to wind down the search. I am so glad he'll be okay. it must have been a terrible few days.

pps The cow pics are from Bruce Whatley's brilliant illustrations from Pear Pinching Pamela- out mid year!

Some Useful Recipes!

How to Clean Burnt Saucepans:

Mix 1tb bicarb to 1 cup water; simmer 2 minutes in thge burnt pan. Cool. Scrub with steel wool.

Sprinkle burnt bit with salt; dribble on a LITTLE water; leave in the sun for 3 days, scrub and rinse.

These can be repeated if most comes off but some burnt residue remains

Home-made detergent

half a cup of water

1 cup grated soap

1 cup washing soda (available at supermarkets)

1 cup white wine vinegar

Bring the water to the boil and stir in the grated soap. Take off the heat, stir till smooth and add the washing soda. When quite blended add the vinegar and store in a sealed container. Keep out of the reach of small children and make sure everyone knows it's NOT homemade sauce for icecream!.

Emergency Pimple Care

If you have a large emerging pimple when you want to look your best:

. DON'T pop it!!!!

Wrap an icecube in a clean towel and hold it on the pimple for about five minutes to reduce the redness.

Now dab with tea tree oil...normally you shouldn't apply undiluted essential oils to your skin, but this is for very rare, very special emergencies!

Take one to two aspirin to reduce pain and inflammation- read instructions on the packet and follow them.

Repeat every 6 hours as necessary.

NB The less you irritate the pimple, the smaller and less red it will be. Treat it as gently as possible!

Home Made ginger Beer

IMPORTANT: THIS DOES HAVE A VERY LITTLE ALCOHOL IN IT, LIKE ALL BREWED SOFT DRINKS! TREAT CAREFULLY!

When I was twelve our family made its first ginger beer. It was a complicated procedure. We fed a ginger beer 'plant' for weeks, adding sugar and ginger every morning, before we fed ourselves or the dog; sometimes we added double the amount if we'd forgotten the day before. Usually a bit more was added 'for luck', said my mother gaily, with a happy disregard of recipes.

We scavenged lemons off the tree next door, and bottles from someone else- in those days of deposits on the bottles you had to be quick, or some toad down the road would grab the lot and haul them back to the shop to get the money back on them.

Then we brewed the ginger beer. My memories of brewing are indistinct, mixed up with the smell of porridge stuck to the bottom of the saucepan and marmite all over the bench and shouts of 'Has any one fed the cockatoo?' and 'Where's my other sock?'

Somewhere among the toast crumbs and flying sunflower seeds (the cockatoo got stroppy if it wasn't fed by 8) my mother added a teaspoon of ginger beer plant to each bottle, then sugar, and water, and lemon juice.

Actually she could never remember how much sugar and how much lemon juice she was supposed to add-the recipe had been eaten by the cockatoo. The cockatoo sat on the back porch and made rude comments as you traveled to the outdoor dunny. It imitated the telephone perfectly too, just as you were comfortably seated- so Mum generally added all the sugar that was left in the packet, especially if the grocer was coming that afternoon and she wanted to empty the caddy.

You also had to put six raisins in each bottle. We didn't have any raisins. I was meant to pick some up on the way home from school, but forgot, and it was too hot to go back down to the shop and anyway the Flintstones were on television- the first time around. Mum suggested we put dates in the bottles instead, but was outvoted. Luckily we found some left over Christmas muscatels instead.

But the brew worked without the raisins. That is to say it bubbled. It bubbled perfectly. We put the bottles in the laundry to mature.

Laundries are the classic place to brew ginger beer. Ours housed the dog too, as well as a budgy cage ( the budgy was deceased- I think it was discouraged by the cockatoo), the foundations of my perpetual motion machine (still unperfected) two tricycles, a pogo stick, an old blanket the dog slept on, a mop, two paint cans left over from the time my mother thought the steps would look better green, the washing machine, and the mangle that was supposed to squeese the moisture out of the washing before itw as hung on the line. .

The mangle rivaled the cockatoo in malice. It ate sheets, and sports uniforms on the last day of holidays, when everywhere was sold out of replacements, and it was no use my mother arguing I should have taken my sport's uniform out of the bag to wash it at the beginning of the holidays, not the end; the mangle wouldn't have eaten it at the beginning of the holidays. The mangle was no fool. It would have waited till the first week of term instead.

My mother claimed that mangles developed your hand eye coordination. You had to have great reflexes or they swallowed your hand too. Mangling mothers produced cricketer sons, she claimed, in some feak of acquired genetic inheritance; but she had no hesitation in disgarding the mangle a few years later for an automatic washing machine, thus blighting our hopes of free seats at Lords.

It was hot that first summer we made ginger beer. The bitumen melted on the road outside, and stuck to our thongs; it was the first summer I remember I actually chose to wear shoes; even the bindi eyes burnt through your callouses.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the extra sugar. Maybe muscatels have more than their fair share of yeast and we should have tried the dates instead. Maybe it's simply my mother's fate that every recipe she follows- or almost follows- goes wrong. Maybe it was just poetic justice that the dog, who'd kept us awake for three nights the week before when the corgi over the road was on heat, should have his own rest interupted when the ginger beer bottles exploded.

I don't think the dog ever recovered from the explosions. Not just one, but a series, as though the first set off the others. Most of us were out of bed by the fourth, and at the laundry door by the sixth, though my youngest brother who was still in nappies didn't make it till the tenth bottle had blown its neck right through the window and into next door's gerberas.

There didnt seem to be much we could do about it. My mother shut the laundry door to contain the damage, and we went back to bed.

The dog was still whimpering in the morning, huddled against the cockies cage, as though so self possessed a bird might protect it. The dog wasn't hurt, though he stank of ginger for weeks, and prefered to sleep under the back stairs from then on. Even the sound of the mangle made him shiver. The cockie looked a bit shattered too; it hadn't realised there was any noise in the world louder than him.

There was glass in the mangle, and in my perpetual motion machine and all around the pogo stick, and ginger beer still bubbling in the carry trays of the tricycles, and the dog's blanket seemed to have brewed up a special froth of its own and was popping happily in the corner. There were also three ginger beer bottles, still intact.

Three ginger beer bottles presented a problem. If left to themselves without the pressure released they might explode while someone was tring to do the washing. On the other hand, they might explode as we defused them. . We looked in the pink pages for ginger beer bomb disposal units, but there weren't any. We had two alternatives; someone could risk life and limb and take the caps off, or we could put the laundry in quarantine indefinatley.

Then last wasn't really an option. My mother was pining for some hand eye coordination with the mangle. I wanted to work on my perpetual motion machine and the owners of the tricycles were whingeing on the back stairs. Also the bottles might explode at any unsuspecting intruder, like Mrs Lemon next door when she borrowed the soap, or the butcher who left his tray of meat in the laundrey when we were out, and the dog had to sleep somewhere, the cockies cage was all very well but what if it rained, and anyway his fur was full of chewed sunflower seeds the cockie had spat out during the night.

My mother has never shirked a crisis. With cries of 'Stand back you lot! I mean stand back!" she attacked the bottles with an open umbrella in front of her as a shield and released the pressure. The bottles promptly volcanoed over her sixties' perm, and the dog began to whimper again and raced for the garage under the house, not to return till the cockie yelled, 'Here dog, dinner!' in mid afternoon, a subtle practical joke he indulged in several times a day.

Actually the left over ginger beer wasn't too bad. We made another lot, and that was even better, with the whole family organised in a roster to let the pressure off, before school and after school and another when we tried put the dog to bed. A mob of school friends got tiddly on it; at least we hoped we did.

I made my first solo batch of ginger beer about fifteen years later. I was living in a one roomed shed at the time, so it would be my bed that got wet, not the dog's. But it didn't. We'd bought some Fowlers ginger beer bottles, which might have helped, with hinged lids that popped off under pressure; lovely things but I don't think they make them any more.

Not that it matters as much now that we can use plastic bottles instead Plastic tends to crack rather than explode, and you can always leave the screw tops on loosely. Explosions from the laundrey or cellar or under the house are no longer a necessary part of ginger beer making.

In the past few years I've refined the ginger beer recipe a bit. This one only takes 48 hours to brew and about 5 minutes work, as opposed to the three weeks of feeding the ginger beer plant.

Recipe:

For every litre bottle of ginger beer you want to make, slice a lemon, bung it in a saucepan with three quarters of a cup of sugar (raw sugar gives it more body; white sugar a clear drink; honey turns it into an explosive ginger mead), half a teaspoon of powdered ginger or a thumb nail sized bit of fresh ginger, a teaspoon of tartaric acid, and add litre of water water. Boil for five minutes- stir a few times so the sugar doesn't form a rock like toffee on the bottom.

Leave till almost cool, add a pinch of dried yeast, and leave two hours or overnight, with the lid on so moths don't fall in. Now strain out the lemon. Use a funnel to pour into PLASTIC bottles. Leave about a third of each bottle empty for the gas to expand into . Leave for another 24 hours in the fridge, then drink. By then it'll be cold, sweet, bubbly and gingery.

I usually make about six litres of home made ginger beer at at a time. It's a more beer - like ginger beer than you'll buy in the shops, slightly bitter, very bubbly, and not very sweet. If you want to make a blander drink that's not so bitter add lemon juice instead of sliced lemons, and use white sugar- a cup rather than three quarters of a cup.

And let the pressure out often. Plastic bottles may not turn into bazookas in the laundry, but they can spit a froth of ginger beer a room's length with ease.

ps don't keep the ginger beer more than three days; avoid if it looks or smells odd or grows wired fubngi. The bottles hands and pan must be CLEAN!