The Distancing Diaries - 16th & 17th October, 2020

 

On Friday I was up just after 6am so I could book next week's National Trust excursion. After my Wii Fit session, I gave the lounge a deep clean, washing my collection of vintage glass, dusting the chandelier and the picture frames, polishing the surfaces, brushing the rugs and mopping the wood floor. 

After breakfast I changed out of my workout out gear (charity shopped leggings and vest), emptied the laundry basket, loaded the washing machine and hung everything up to dry in the utility room.  While I got to work on turning the green tomatoes I'd left covered in salt the previous day into chutney,  Jon cracked on with removing the bamboo, managing a couple of hours hard graft before the torrential rain - which hadn't been forecast - sent him scuttling back inside. 

I've set myself the task of photographing and measuring every garment in the Kinky Shed, ready to upload to eBay every month for the foreseeable future, which should keep me out of trouble until next year. I don't want to sound like a pessimist but I really can't see the festivals restarting in 2021 and, with no vintage fairs happening, online selling is going to have to sustain us until life returns to some kind of normality.

WEARING: Vintage Interlinks Indian cotton midi dress and Frye Campus boots (both eBay), 1970s Phool Indian block print waistcoat (Eyewood Vintage) 

Leaving Jon to organise a skip for delivery for tomorrow, I continued with my photos in the rain, grateful for the shelter of the bastard massive lime tree.After a break for noodles, Jon went outside to work on Gilbert with some success, he's running again! Meanwhile I cropped my photos & created twenty five eBay listings which I saved as drafts before watching BoJo address the nation.

Tea was Jon's homemade pasta sauce with vegan meatballs, pasta and grated cheese. 

We decided to watch Gardener's World on catch-up another day, having a Spooks extravaganza instead. Adam joined the team. Needless to say, as it was Friday, we consumed one or two rum & colas. Before I went to bed I left the bathroom plants (all twelve of them) soaking in the bath.

On Saturday Jon was up first, seeing to the lads and bringing mugs of tea back to bed where we read until 8.30am. Jon went downstairs to start on the sausages whilst I stripped and changed the bed and put the houseplants back. After our sausage sandwich breakfast I put yesterday's washing away, watered the rest of the houseplants and Jon supervised the delivery of the skip.

WEARING: Vintage psychedelic maxi (very tatty, hence the reason it's been relegated to gardening attire)

Can you make out that thing in my hair? It's a Tibetan sterling silver hair stick, bought from Goa's infamous Anjuna Flea Market, which I often use to skewer my hair in place although, despite owning it for the best part of twenty years, it rarely pops up on my blog. When we were in Kerala in 2012 (we've been three times) Jon & I were roaming the backwaters when I realised I'd mislaid it, a few days later and I found it hanging from a creeper, it must have become entangled when we were walking.

The next three hours were spent in the garden, clearing the area by the pond where we'd piled up all the debris we'd removed from the border at the end of August as well as the contents of the rubbish pile from Jon's shed clear-outs during lockdown. After a break for homemade apple & strawberry crumble we raked up the leaves and weeded outside the front of the house and, garden waste bin full, added it to the skip. The company told us we could keep the skip for a fortnight but it's ready for collection now.

The postman arrived with a parcel! My lovely friend Sarah sent me this incredible Moghul-inspired shelf she'd made herself. Isn't it gorgeous? She also included some seeds packed in an envelope she'd made from a vintage gardening book. 

Jon spent the remainder of the afternoon spark out on the settee watching some ancient black and white war film. Me, I'm like that annoying rabbit on the battery advert and never gets tired, so I carried on with photographing the stock. Now every skirt in the stockroom has been catalogued. 

Tea was a salad with cheese, olives, grated carrot, lollo rosso (homegrown), tomatoes (also homegrown), Jon's pickled cucumber and Poor Man's Capers (made by me).

According to the TV guide Inspector Montalbano is on BBC4 later, I'm not sure if it's a new series or one we've watched before but I don't mind watching Luca Zingaretti again, and again and again...

Cheers!

We've got a huge bag of donations to take to the charity shop tomorrow, the manager told us that they're absolutely desperate and it would be rude not to have a look round while we're dropping them off, wouldn't it? Chazzing used to be such a commonplace activity, something we did almost daily. Now I'm so excited about going I find myself planning what I'll be wearing the night before...how life has changed!

Stay safe and see you soon!

Cochin On A Budget - Travels To Goa & Beyond

If you watched The Real Marigold Hotel last night you'll have heard the intrepid band of pensioners marvel at how cheap Cochin is. We got by on an average £22 a day between us - that's all our food & drink, accommodation, transport and sightseeing, pretty much the same as we live on in Goa.

I'm not sure what the budget for the Marigold gang is but it's a world away from ours, after all they're celebrities and we're self-employed market traders. Their accommodation* was just around the corner from ours (so you can imagine our squeals of excitement when we saw it on TV last night) and, by bizarre coincidence, we'd taken a photo of its impressive gateway after we learned that it had once formed the boundary wall of the East India Company offices. We even had a spiced, iced tea in the chi-chi arts café in the grounds of their hotel and got clobbered with "luxury tax", two drinks cost more than most of our dinners did!

*Our 2010 edition of the Rough Guide to Kerala lists the tariff as being between $340-450 a night for a suite, way out of reach for your average British pensioner!

The Real Marigold Hotel gang stayed here

I've mentioned that we'd haggled down the room rate for our homestay. Before we left Goa we'd visited an internet cafe and searched recommendations on Trip Advisor for budget accommodation in Fort Cochin. After checking the room rates we selected a few likely candidates and Googled their phone numbers. As we'd bought an Indian sim card when we arrived in India (around £3.50) our calls were charged at local rate. Although many landlords use internet booking sites, most prefer to cut out the middleman and avoid paying commission to a website so, if you offer to stay for more than a couple of nights, they'll usually come up with a better price - we got a 60% discount.

Paper masala dosa (£1), Mysore masala dosa (80p), cardamon chai (20p) and veg thali (£1) and one of our favourite eateries in the premises of an old pepper warehouse.  

Food prices vary enormously and eating in the tourist restaurants in the trendy bit of Fort Cochin can often set you back more than you'd pay at home. These places are frequented by Westerners and the food is either bland, adapted to what's considered suitable for a foreign palate or the tired old Hakka noodles/fried rice traveller's fare. Who wants to travel halfway around the world, hang around with a load of other Westerners & eat boring food? Not us. We look for places away from the main tourist drag, with signs advertising "homely food" or "Authentic Keralan Cuisine" and if the clientele's mainly Indian we're reassured that the menu's going to be more to our taste. 

Taken from our table at The Seagull Hotel. Surly service but ice cold beers and a great view.

Due to Kerala's higher taxes, beer prices are double those of Goa and only hotels are licensed to serve it. Spirits aren't available in bars and can only be bought in government liquor shops for home consumption. As we'd been to Kerala before we were prepared, buying a bottle of McDowell's white rum in Goa (£2 a litre) and enjoying a glass or two in our room before we went out - Thums Up cola is available everywhere. We'll have water with our dinner and share a couple of large Kingfisher Blues in a hotel bar after we've eaten.

Indian Ferrari, Indian Ferrari.....You want Indian Ferrari, Sir? 

Taxi drivers will continuously stop to offer a whistle-stop heritage tour for around £12 but, if you nip into any of the tourist information points in and around Fort Cochin, you can pick up a free walking map marked with places of interest and do it at your own pace (with plenty of stops for lime soda or chai.)

Here's Vasco da Gama's house - now a homestay and a cafe.

Top of the tourist attractions is the historic area of Jew Town. Get there early before it gets inundated by wealthy, snap-happy Americans straight off the cruise ship.

Jews have been trading on the Malabar Coast since King Solomon's times and settled in Cochin in the Twelfth century. Today only 22 families remain.

The Paradesi Synagogue was constructed in 1567,  and it's the oldest working synagogue in India. 

If you've ever read Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh you'll be familiar with the synagogue. I'd just finished the book when we visited in 2007 but stupidly turned up on a Friday afternoon when we should have know that it would be closed for Sabbath. 

I've waited ten years to see these 18th Century hand-painted Chinese tiles, each one of them featuring a slightly different design, and it was well worth the wait!

Both photos were borrowed from Google as cameras weren't allowed

The Paradesi Synagogue is open from 10 - 1pm Monday to Friday and from 2 - 6pm Monday - Thursday. 

No photos, no talking, dress modestly. Admission £1

The creation of Israel in the 1940s led to a mass exodus from Cochin. Many of the Jews chose to leave their larger possessions behind which lead to a plethora of high end antiques emporiums springing up. Although much of the stock on offer these days is reproduction there's still some incredible stuff. Most places forbid photography and assistants follow browsers round like hawks but looking is free and a wonderful way to while away an hour or so.

Not marked on the map is the Cochin Police Museum which we stumbled upon by accident. Free to visit and staffed by a super smiley and welcoming serving policeman, we admired a exhibition of uniforms throughout the ages, starting with the Raja of Cochin's bodyguard's lunghi to the modern day police uniform of khaki green. These days there's even a specialist Women's Squad, who patrol the streets of Fort Cochin in a Barbie pink van.

The autopsy room wasn't for the feint hearted, 3D reconstructions & gory photographs and case notes of machete attacks, strangulations, garrotings, stabbings and shootings as well as pictures of the unfortunates who'd fallen under trains and been hit by lorries. Particularly haunting was a photo of a family with a pretty young woman in a white blouse and hanging up beside the picture was the actual blouse riddled with bloodstains and holes - her husband had shot her shortly after the photograph was taken.

There's some stunning historical churches in Fort Cochin. St Francis was India's first European church, built in the 15th Century with an ancient Dutch cemetery attached, sadly locked up and no longer open to the public. 

 The Santa Cruz Cathedral Basilica was built by the Portuguese in the 16th Century and rebuilt in the 1880s.

Both churches are still in use but visitors are welcome between services.

Fort Cochin is connected to the modern centre of Ernakulum via Willington Island by passenger ferry. They run until 9pm, take around 30 minutes and a single ticket costs the equivalent of 5p. There's quite a leap from the launch pad to the boat but the staff are on the jetty to hold your hand and help you across.

Once you've disembarked in Ernakulum you can jump in a tuk tuk and visit the Hill Palace, 14 km south of the city centre (a return journey with an hour's waiting time should cost you around £4).  The royal family of Cochin once owned over 40 palaces all of which were confiscated by the state government following independence.

The Hill Palace (£1 admission) now serves as a museum with some truly fabulous stuff on display including a room stuffed with antique jewellery, bejeweled maharajah's turbans, precious gemstones and antique dresses threaded with gold. Frustratingly, as is often the way in many of India's state-run museums, the information labels on the exhibits are rudimentary to say the least, "Bangle" is the tag attached to an incredibly ancient piece of silver tribal jewellery and "Timepiece, gift from the Prince Of Wales" on a finely enameled & bejeweled pocket watch...Who? When? Why? After re-reading the Rough Guide later we discovered that the wonderfully ornate knife bedecked in decorative bells that we'd admired was used for beheadings.

With the huge groups of schoolchildren , more interested in oogling the funny foreigners than the exhibits, it can all get a bit raucous so once you've done the cultural thing go and wander around the surrounding deer park and do as the locals do, have a picnic beneath the shade of the cashew trees.

That contraption with the cage? That's where the Raja would have his enemies hung and left for the birds to peck to death. Lovely!

Fort Cochin is still very much a thriving fishing port and these 15th Century Chinese nets dominate the skyline, watched by an army of salivating cats. Tourists can buy the day's catch directly from the fishermen and have it cooked at one of the many tiny stalls flanking the harbour. Don't worry, at the end of each day, the cats got anything that hadn't sold.

Typically, with our spur of the moment type travel, when we tried to buy return train tickets to Goa we discovered that there were none available for at least a week but, no need to panic, nothing is ever a problem in India. We saw that there were a couple of tickets available on The Malabar Express and, because it sounded wonderfully exotic, we decided to book two sleeper class seats and slowly make our way back to Goa via Mangalore instead.

 With a history dating back to the Roman Empire and named the Estuary of The Wolf  by Moroccan adventurer Ibn Battuta in 1342, who considered it to be the greatest port of the Malabar kingdom, surely Mangalore had be worth a visit?

See you soon!

See more photos of our walk around Fort Cochin HERE.

Groove Is In The Art - Travels To Goa & Beyond

As luck would have it - and it really was luck, we didn't even know we were going to Kerala until we'd secured rail tickets the morning before - our trip to Fort Cochin coincided with the Biennale, the city's two yearly festival of contemporary art.

The exciting thing about the Biennale was that rather than staging exhibitions in purpose-built art galleries, for three months the entire city becomes a showcase for art, encouraging both residents and tourists alike to explore every corner of Cochin. 

The town beach served as a fish cemetery, a memorial to the tons of sea life plucked from the ocean every day.   

The city walls were whitewashed to create a blank canvas for street artists.....

Normally out of bounds to the general public, Cochin's private members clubs and the reading rooms of the city's intelligentsia opened their grounds, transforming them into sculpture gardens in which everybody could roam freely.

And those wonderful disused, colonial-era warehouses of Mattencherry? They were unlocked, the sealed & shuttered windows prised open and the floors and rafters swept free of cobwebs and replaced with art.

Can you imagine the health and safety implications of opening derelict 17th Century buildings with rickety staircases, crumbling beams and subsidence to the general public here in the West?

Taken in Aspinwall House, the former premises of English spice traders Aspinwall & Company, established in 1867.

And the art? Stupendously good. Some shocking - life-sized photographs of the newly-deceased dressed in haute couture; Others humbling - tributes to the Indian manual worker, a bust cast in bronze, not of an eminent politician but of a railway sweeper, one of the thousands of women risking life & limb 12 hours a day, 7 days a week  by clearing the tracks of debris and a shelf of three items of sweat-stained clothing, the sole possessions of a road worker; Some thought-provoking - photography, not of beautiful buildings or the verdant neighbouring countryside but of the mundane, building sites, water towers, garages and food kiosks; To the downright odd - from a twenty foot scale model of the Colosseum, crafted from dog chews to a life-size sculpture in paper of a public urinal.

Exhibits include, in homage to the humble barber, a barber's chair with a years-worth of hair sweepings, the Colosseum recreated in dog chews, a life size model of a public urinal - in paper, a room filled with light bulbs and another filled with photographs of all the artist's possessions.

Of course, there's far more to Cochin's arts scene than the contemporary. The city is the only place in Kerala that visitors are guaranteed to catch a performance of Kathakali - the classical Indian dance performed by an all-male cast, adorned in elaborately colourful make-up, costumes (pom poms and coin jewellery galore!) and masks. This Hindu performance art form is believed to have started in the 17th Century but its roots lie in temple and folk art said to date back to the first millennium AD.

Traditionally Kathakali takes place in Hindu temple grounds and go on throughout the night but Cochin has several dedicated theatres with shorter, more tourist-friendly performances acted out by professional Kathakali actors, who have trained for years.

 If you arrive early, like we did, it's possible to watch the actors applying their make-up prior to the performance.

You'll also get a lesson (in English) deciphering the actor's intricate facial movements, which will help you understand the story a little better.

The princess reminded me of Boy George in his 1980s heyday.

The performance we saw tells of a prince who loses his wife to the Demon King in a card game. The princess refuses to do the menial tasks demanded of her by her captor and is beaten. She appeals to the gods for help and is given a never-ending sari which prevents the demon from stripping her and humiliating her further.  In return she vows to leave her hair unwashed until she is released.

 Twelve years later, after a long forest exile, the prince meets and fights the Demon King. He wins the battle and avenges his enemy by disemboweling him and eating his heart. The princess is released and after washing her hair in the Demon King's blood, thanks the gods and returns to her prince.

During the make-up session we learned that the good guys had green faces, the baddies had red ones. and that all the actors put red dye in their eyes to heighten the drama. 

This chap is our flawed hero, the gambling prince. Check out those pompoms!

We'd seen amateur Kathakali in Kerala years before but this version was miles better and at £3 a ticket great value for money.

By strange coincidence a new series of the ace BBC show, The Real Marigold Hotel starts this Wednesday and is set in Cochin (billed in the TV guides as Kochi, the city's modern name).

See you soon!

Linking to Patti & The Gang for Visible Monday.

PS For the full set of Biennale & Kathakali photos click HERE