How do you like your eggs scrambled? An easy question, but the answers are always revealing. At least to me. I am dismissing, because, yes, of course, those who do not like eggs. I know that such people exist. Just as I know that there are people who do not like cheese. Knowing is not the same as believing. What beggared lives these people must lead! Anyway, back to scrambled eggs.
The right answer to the question is, of course, that you like them moist but not runny, so that they can be dolloped on freshly made bread that has been slathered with butter and devoured with utter relish and a twist of freshly ground pepper.
There are those who bring health matters into play and aver that scrambled eggs have to be “well cooked” so that the egg is reduced to a sort of rubble that bounces if you drop it. This is not the “right answer” (see above) but any scrambled egg is better than no scrambled egg, so it still has my vote.
In a modern novel that I read and whose title and author I have not been able to recall, there was a stand-out passage that stated that the egg was proof of the existence of god, in so far as that there were so many ways (and all of them delicious) to cook the things that there had to be some sort of divinity behind their existence. I, much later, was in a bookshop and idly picked up a Dictionary of Modern Quotations and found exactly the paragraph that had struck me on my first reading! Stupidly (and most uncharacteristically) I did not immediately buy the book and the reference has since been lost to me. If any reader is able to fill in the author and title I would be immensely grateful and somewhat relieved!
The method of making scrambled eggs is simplicity itself, but the ‘acceptable’ end result is far more problematical.
Which brings us to Death. It has been reasonably said that Death is the Great Simplification. At least for the dead, if not for the surviving living. But philosophical questions about what death or Death does or doesn’t actually do were not what was on my mind when the title of this piece came to me.
I was thinking about an ex-college who is dead, and dead before his time – if that actually means anything nowadays. I was getting changed after my swim and something about the changing room brought back a memory of him. He was a sporty person and, although that is not how I would ever characterise myself, we did play sport together, usually squash (in which his superior hand-eye coordination and fitness usually beat me) and badminton (in which my superior knowledge of the rules and basic tactics beat him) and I had also seen him play other sports, as well as a never-to-be-forgotten water skiing (and beer drinking) outing. He was active, always doing, up for anything. And now he’s dead and the whole concept doesn’t sit well with my memories of him.
Just after I was informed of his death, I wrote to his widow expressing my condolences, but in the immediate aftermath of loss, words in a letter are not read by the bereaved much more than appreciation that the writer has said something to show that they share the loss.
Time has passed and the jolt of memory that I had made me think of writing again. A simple act of community, of fellow feeling. Or not. Whatever I thought that I was doing, would it necessarily be seen in the same way by the person who had lost the most? Would my letter be received as comfort or as a re-opening of wounds? A simple impulse could be anything but.
My mind is like a kaleidoscope, but without the symmetry that the mirror at 45° that makes the pretty patterns, it is lots of little disparate pieces of information and opinion forming an almost-picture, but nevertheless one that satisfies me.
I have (I know) actually read books like Zadig, The Voyage to the End of the Night and The Red Room and I have zero memory of them. Presumably in some distant and rarely visited section of my mind, some vestige of the effort I put into turning the pages (it was that long ago!) must still exist. The first of these must be where I first heard the word Serendipity, though in my mind it is more linked to Horace Walpole than Voltaire and I have vague recollections of reading a version of The Three Princes of Serendip – my point is, that my mind exists on half forgotten (sometimes fully forgotten) snippets from here and there sometimes linking up in fortuitous correspondences. Or not. You could say that my mind wanders rather than links and that the line of ‘reasoning’ is tenuous, but satisfying. At least to me.
So, we finally get to patatas bravas (literally, savage or wild potatoes) form my pondering on the propriety of writing a further letter to a bereaved friend. The simplicity of the action is replete with complexity.
Like patatas bravas. Patatas bravas is a staple tapa, and most restaurants have a version of it. It is a simple dish: fried potatoes, topped with a spicy mayonnaise sauce. Anyone can make it: fry your potatoes, add a dash of tomato ketchup and Tabasco to your mayonnaise and you are away. Except what you actually get served as patatas bravas will be as various as the restaurants that serve them. A simple dish that few can agree on. Complexity, and sometimes-delicious complexity, writ large!
I suppose it is a truism that the simple things are always difficult to get right. I was told that when Ghandi was staying in London, all he required was a place where he could do his spinning, sitting cross legged at his basic loom wearing the loin cloth that became one of his most recognizable attributes. When one person remarked to a member of Ghandi’s staff how touching such simplicity was, the man replied, “Do you have any idea how expensive such simplicity is to create here in Central London?”
Exactly.
Simplicity is a concept like any other. Defining it is the problem!
And have I decided to do the simple action than produced all this thought. Not really. But there again, I haven’t decided against it either. I just jiggle the kaleidoscope a little more and see what happens.
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