Marmalade

 Way back in 2020, in the first winter of the pandemic when everything was locked down, and life was singularly depressing, I planted a blood orange tree.

For the first couple of years it did nothing much, but for the last two years it's produced a few decent oranges every year.

This winter it came good and produced a decent crop. 

Strangely the possums seemed to like them as well, so we had to mount a rescue operation and harvest them before they were decimated.

So, a few days ago we turned about half of them into marmalade, mixing them with calamansi's from the plant we have on the back deck.

They have produced a satisfyingly bitter traditional English style marmalade

as for the rest of the oranges - we sliced them up and dried them in a food dehydrator to add to cakes  and perhaps to soak in vodka further down the track for something truly decadent ...

Maybe, just maybe, spring is coming

After what seems like an endless winter, although in reality it has only been a couple of months of freezing weather, punctuated by the occasional multi-day downpour of freezing sleety rain, there are signs that spring is coming.

While it’s still cold at night, the afternoons are beginning to actually feel warm, warm enough to sit out in the sun, even if sometimes you need a jacket to shield yourself from the chilly wind off the mountains.

And even though it's still chilly after dark, we managed a barbecue sitting under the stars, drinking wine and talking, even if we were wearing puffer jackets and beanies.

Certainly the magpies think spring is on the way, squabbling and fighting over nest material, and the parrots are beginning to cheep and squeak the way they do when they are feeling amorous.

Nothing much is happening in the garden yet, except that the broad bean plants have begun to poke their heads up and the kale plants I started off in early winter are beginning to come on.

Up at the Athenaeum, we are in limbo with the recataloguing project, it’s a big job, and we are investigating if we can get some museum or library interns to help.

As always we have no money, the Athenaeum runs on a shoestring, and being in a fairly remote rural area we don’t have that much of a talent pool to draw on, although I’m sure there must be some retired librarians or English teachers we can persuade to get involved.

Otherwise we took down our successful winter exhibition about apple growing in the region on Friday.

We had had a mystery object competition

no one guessed the correct answer, so we decided to give the prize to the funniest suggestion - a device to train snakes to perform circus tricks.

The actual answer is that they were bottle cutters - you heated up the ring and slipped it over a wine or beer bottle. When the ring cooled it compressed and cracked the bottle, leaving you the top section that could be used as a plant cloche, and the bottom could be filled with kerosene and a floating wick to protect delicate plants from frost.

The bottle cutters (and a few other objects to do with the early twentieth century apple trade) are not ours, and were borrowed from farmers in the region who found them at the back of various sheds.

We’ve made the decision to fully document them before returning them, and then perhaps work with the owners to find some local collecting institution - which we are not - to add them to their collection before the knowledge of their purpose and provenance is lost forever

Should have been easy ...

We had a simple plan for a couple of days mid week in Melbourne.

J had a medical appointment and it was three or four days after her birthday, so we thought it would be fun to have a couple of days in the city and take in the French Impressionists exhibition at the NGV.

We booked the train, and booked the cats into the cat motel for three nights as we’d be back too late to collect them.

Turned up at the cattery, and they had lost the booking.

However they had space free so we checked the mogs in. So far so good, and the cattery did call us later to say that they’d found the booking and apologised for the inconvenience.

Then on to the bus to take us down to the train station at Wangaratta.

As always it turned up five minutes late.

However, we had a shock when the bus driver asked us where we were going.

“Melbourne, Southern Cross”, we said. 

“There’s no trains” he said.

It turned out that the trains had been cancelled due to an incident involving the fire brigade.

So off we went down to Wangaratta.

When we got there, V/Line had swung into emergency backup mode.

Our bus, the bus from Beechworth, was going express straight to Southern Cross - we were to stay on board for as soon as they loaded up some of the other people going to Melbourne we were off down the freeway to Melbourne.

V/line did an excellent job sorting the problem and getting us there, but the bus wasn’t ideal, a bit past its use by date, with cramped plastic synthetic leather seats, a tiny toilet designed for a dwarf at the back. It was kind of like being stuck on RyanAir or AirAsia but with less space.

On the way out of Wangaratta, we passed a group of fire trucks and police utes clustered around a crossing on the train line. I’m guessing that whatever the problem had been, that had been where it was.

Despite my quibbles about the bus, it drove at a steady 110km/h most of the way down and deposited at Southern Cross a little before 4.30pm.

Now, we had a little problem. J had lost her Myki card, or perhaps more accurately couldn’t remember where she put it after the last time we came back from Melbourne, so we’d phoned it in a day or two before, reporting it as missing.

Normally they send a replacement card in the mail, but as we were travelling to the city, they had said we could pick up a new one at the Public Transport service centre in the train station.

That worked really well, we showed a nice friendly lady the email saying we had reported the card lost, and she issued J a replacement card on the spot.

That was the good bit. The bad bit was that J noticed in the service centre a big sign saying that trains on the Hurstbridge line were suspended due to a derailment at Clifton Hill.

We’d splurged a bit and booked the Pullman in East Melbourne because it had been J’s birthday a few days before (which was why news of the derailment had totally passed us by) and because it’s bang opposite Jolimont train station on guess what, the Hurstbridge line.

Our idea had been to get the train to Jolimont.

Jolimont station - no trains

Obviously that wasn’t going to happen, and peak hour was beginning to rumble into action, which meant the tram, never a good idea with travel bags, was really not going to be an option.

So we jumped on the train to Flinders Street and grabbed a cab from the taxi rank outside. Ten bucks later we were checking  into out hotel.

So far so good.

Our plan had originally been to go out for dinner, but we were knackered and ended up eating in the hotel, and very good it was too. Not the cheapest, but good.

The next day was dull and cold as it often is in Melbourne at this time of year. We had initially planned to go down to the city centre on the tram, but the day was so grey and dispiriting we contented ourselves with brunch at the East Melbourne branch of Laurent - the people who do a lot of artisan breads and so on - and a walk down Bridge Road and then loop back through the gardens, while J reminisced about living in a flat in Clifton Hill while she was a student and riding her bike to Uni through the gardens some time in the Seventies.

Along the way we stopped off at a pharmacy for something and noticed quite an amazing display of old pharmacists bottles on a shelf above the 21st century display items (ever since I documented Dow’s I’ve had a thing for nineteenth century pharmacists’ bottles and jars…)

Basically, we then continued our wander up Bridge Road - lots of empty shops - and then back to the hotel for an hour or two before J’s medical appointment.

That evening we ate at Gepetto’s trattoria - a wonderful traditional family run restaurant - good solid traditional Italian food.

The next day started out with J having a group call with Canada as part of a specialist art course she’s doing.

After that we rattled down to the NGV on the tram for the French Impressionist’s exhibition - like all NGV winter exhibitions it was too crowded - the NGV really don’t seem to have realised that if you sell timed tickets for exhibitions you should cap the numbers in each time slot, and not allow walk ins to buy tickets at busy times.

The exhibition was good, though not brilliant, a few Monets and Pisarros and the odd Renoir.

There were people taking pictures, but J, being an artist, probably confused people by taking close ups of brush strokes and the like as exemplars of the artists’ techniques rather than the pictures themselves.

Because it had been J’s birthday a couple of days before and it would be our wedding anniversary at the end of the week we treated ourselves to a genteel but overpriced lunch in the gallery and a glass of bubbly, followed by a walk round the new acquisitions and a couple of the other galleries of nineteenth century British art, before catching the tram back to the hotel to pick up our bags and get a taxi down to Southern Cross, the main rail station in Melbourne.

Knowing that V/line’s attempts at catering on long distance trains are sporadic and unexciting we picked up some sandwiches from the Woolworths Metro before boarding the train.

The train left on time, arrived in Wangaratta on time, and apart from a slightly annoying child who clearly had behavioural problems, relatively pleasant.

Wangaratta station was a surprise though.

For the last ten years passenger trains in either direction have stopped at platform 1 outside the old ticket hall. As there’s only three passenger trains each way plus a couple of NSW XPT’s that wasn’t a problem.

However this time it was different. As part of the redevelopment of the line they’s built a new platform, platform 2 surprisingly enough.

Now our connecting bus to Beechworth left, as it always has, from outside the old station building on platform 1 and there was no obvious way from getting from platform 2 to platform 1.

However a kind lady, seeing our confusion told us there was a lift at the far end of the platform (aren’t they always) down to the underpass to save us having to drag our bags round the station precinct.

The bus back to Beechworth was slightly late, but was not crowded and delivered us back home on time.

After that it was a case of putting the heating on, a couple of whiskies and a nibble, and then to bed.

It should have been an easy trip, but the problems, none of which were really anyone’s fault made it more of a hassle than it should have been …

 

A fairly flat fortnight

 The last two weeks have continued cold, possibly even colder than the previous two. To add to the joys we've had freezing rain and sleet on and off. 

Games have most definitely been off. Even the cats have refused to go outside and there is no point attempting any serious gardening, although our Siberian kale has sprouted. (The Tuscan kale also sprouted a few days after the Siberian kale, but grudgingly and reluctantly. Of the chard and beetroot, there's no sign, we need a few days of sun and comparative warmth.)

It's been the sort of weather where your inner child hopes for snow, if only for an hour or two, but instead we have days of depressing wet chilly greyness.

Talking of snow, apparently they did get a dusting up at Stanley, but it had all disappeared by the time I was up at the Athenaeum yesterday putting in an hour or three on the publishers list.

It was however cold, so cold that even at midday the wash hand basin in the outside public toilet was still full of ice.

Other than that I've done very little other than go down an internet rabbit hole in pursuit of some anarchists who cycled across Europe to beg a meeting with Tolstoy.

As in all of these stories there is a nugget of truth - the anarchists did meet with Tolstoy in the middle of winter, but it's unlikely in the extreme that they rode their bicycles across Europe in a freezing winter to get there.

I'm still trying to get my head around Constance Garnett and her involvement with the Russian exile community, and had been researching Louise and Aylmer Maude, who as well as competing with Garnett in the translation of Tolstoy's novels, were Tolstoyan utopianists, and had more in common with William Morris's idealistic view of a world dominated by small self governing communes of artisans, rather than the more classic form of state capitalism envisaged by the Russian revolutionaries of the 1890s.

It was while researching the Maudes that I came across the loopy tale of the bike riding anarchists - it's the sort of footnote to history one wants to be true, even if it can't be.

I also had a little triumph as regards home maintenance.

I was cooking dinner while J was in the bath, and I heard a shout. The bath tap knob had fallen off when she tried to turn it off - we have one of these multi degree of freedom taps - left right for hot cold and up down for on off.

I pushed the knob back on and that at least let us turn the tap off.

On inspection I found that if you unscrewed the adjustment lever from the tap boss there was a little otherwise inaccessible grub screw that had slackened.

The screw needed to be adjusted with an allen key.

Now I had plenty of allen keys from assembling flat pack furniture and routine bike maintenance, but they were all too big, but fortunately I found one of a fine enough gauge in a box of left over computer spares, and once I had an allen key that fitted, it took only a minute or two to disassemble the tap, remount the knob and reassemble the tap.

Job done. 

And I felt extremely pleased with myself for fixing the problem.

Now, we have the same tap in the main shower and the little guest shower in our second bathroom, so I've invested in a set of allen keys, so that if it happens again I won't need to spend half an hour furiously scratching about looking for a hex key that might fit ...

The first two weeks of winter ...

 So how's the past two weeks been?

In one sense the big news, my finishing the cataloguing of Lake View House for the National Trust was underwhelming.

I'd told them before the close off meeting that I was going to resign, having worked myself out of a job, so it was simply a matter of quickly reviewing what had been done, shaking hands, and exchanging a few pleasantries.

I was far more excited by my finally building a workbench out of recycled materials in the outside studio.

And then the weather turned cold, then cold and wet, then even colder - the last few days we've been waking up to a thick layer of ice on the cars in the morning, and the heat pump has only just been coping in the mornings, but it's unusually cold for Beechworth so hopefully it will warm up a tad to normal winter chilliness.

All this cold and wet weather has of course meant no gardening, but it has allowed me to delve into how a 1890s Russian exile support group inadvertantly led to the popularisation of nineteenth century Russian literature in England, mostly through the work of Constance Garnett.

I've been finding that this delving into anti tsarist politics has been helping me brush up my very rusty Russian language skills, which is useful - for what I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them somewhere.

Up at the Athenaeum, it's been the grind of working through the supposed publishers and creating a controlled vocabulary.

I'm finding so many errors that the whole collection probably needs to be recatalogued, but for the moment it's a pretty mechanical exercise, chasing down obscure nineteenth century publishers. It's also a problem that, Australia being a small place then - the population at around Federation was only about four million - smaller short lived Australian publishers from the nineteenth century left little or no trace.

But even so there are snippets of interest.

Besides an 1863 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there's an 1863 edition of Huxley's Lectures to Working Men, which is essentially a defence of Darwinian evolution, and an 1869 edition of Fritz Muller's (the discoverer of Mullerian mimicry) Arguments for Darwin, suggesting that one or more of the subscribers to the Athenaeum library was taking an active interest in evolutionary theory.

It also suggests there may have been an active Natural History group in and around Stanley, and tracing them and their meetings might give an insight into life in the goldfields after the gold began to run out and Stanley became a more settled community.

And along the way I've had a minor family history triumph, recovering some missing photos of J's ancestors from a twenty five year old CD-R, which is normally considered the upper limit for standard non archival CD's.

Not that I can claim any great technical skill, it was pure chance that the scruffy machine that lives in the outside studio that I use when I need to look something up had a working CD drive that could actually read the disk.

Still, all good experience...

And Fanny?

 As I've written elsewhere Fanny, or Fanya, Stepniak is a mystery to me.

However, I used the State Library's online subscription to the Times Digital Archive to read the reports of Sergei Stepniak's death, funeral and inquest, and that sheds a little more light on the mysterious Fanny.

Close reading of the Times reports reveals that Fanny's patronymic was Markova and a suggestion that she may have been of Polish or Polish-Jewish origin. (Poles of course do not use the Russian naming convention of forename-patronymic-surname, but during the Russian occupation of Poland in the nineteenth century some upper and middle class Poles adopted it, especially when dealing with Russian officialdom.)

This lets me wave my hands in the air a bit and hypothesize that her name was not Fanny, but Franciszka, and she opted for Fanny for the same reason a friend of mine always used to introduce herself as Frankie - no one could actually spell Franciszka, and if she introduced herself using her full name, she usually ended up as Francesca.

I quite like this hypothesis as it explains why she always gave her name as Fanny and not Fanya - only Russian speaking acquaintances would have called her Fanya - and assuming that her patronymic was indeed Markov - would suggest that her father's forename was Marek - a fairly common Polish forename.

It also explains why her patronymic was not widely used and doesn't appear on official documents such as her death certificate or the probate records for her husband - it was simply something made up to keep Russian officialdom happy.

The other snippet I gleaned from the Times reports was that Sergei Stepniak had been living in Britain for roughly ten years at the time of his death.

Normally one would expect him to be in the 1891 census, especially given that he was a minor public figure which would have made dodging the census difficult for him.

However, a search of the New York Times archive shows that he was reported as giving several public lectures in New York in January 1891.

The 1891 census in the UK took place on April 5th, and while I can’t place the Stepaniaks as being in the USA on that date, my guess is that they were still overseas at the time of the census.

A little time with Constance

 

It's a long weekend and officially the start of the ski season, and right on cue we got our first soaking storm of the winter bringing snow to the mountains and cold sleety rain lower down.

Impossible to do anything outside so yesterday I spent a little bit of time trying to tease out the relationships  of the translators of Russian literature in 1890s England.

Mostly women, they clustered around Sergei Stepniak and Feliks Volkhovski who were prominent Russian exiles living in various parts of London, for example Stepniak lived on Woodstock Road in Bedford Park, and through the Russian exile community they became associated with both the Friends of Russian Freedom, a group that smuggled banned books and papers into tsarist Russia.

Unlike Ethel Voynich, who was also a member of the group, neither Constance, or her sister in law Olive, had any prior knowledge of Russian before being introduced to Stepniak and Volkhoviski, and were both taught Russian by Volkhovski.

Constance, who had previously studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the early 1880s, took to Russian like a duck to water, and went on to produce translations of almost all the Russian literature.

Most photographs of Constance show her as an old lady, but the one above, from her student days, show someone who was clearly a determined and attractive young woman.

Both Constance and her sister in law Olive seem to have been attracted to the charismatic Stepniak, Olive cutting off all her hair in anguish when Sergei was killed crossing a level crossing in Hampstead a few days before Christmas 1895

However there's no real hint of a sexual relationship between Stepniak and either Constance or Olive.

Stepniak appears to have been devoted to his wife, Fanya, and after his death Fanya worked with Constance on her translations.

On the other hand Volkhovski seems to have been a bit handsy and the women exchanged letters joking about how, even in his later years when he had grown fat and unattractive Volkhovski still tried it on.

Strangely, unlike the other women in the group who had spent time in Russia working as governesses while perfecting their Russian, Constance never did - perhaps her experience of working as a governess after graduation  made her reluctant as did her marriage in 1889 to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader.

She did visit Russia twice in the years before the 1917 revolutions, but never learned to speak Russian fluently, although, perhaps in part due to her training as a classicist, she could read and parse Russian prose on the fly, no easy task (I remember these dread translation exercises where someone would read a passage from a book and you would try and write down a simultaneous translation, and the the group would critique your attempts).

In researching her life I've developed an admiration for her abilities, something even newer translators of Russian literature acknowledge ...