The best things in life are free.

Buddleia, also known as the Butterfly Bush, being true to its name.

This plant flowers almost perpetually throughout the year and is one of my favourites. I bring the flowers indoors and the perfume lingers on and on. Bees love it too! I took this shot this morning.

Photo Copyright SvD.

A pretty red thing.

Photo copyright SvD.

RECIPE: Ground Nut Stew. Copyright SvD.

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Peanuts are very popular in West African cuisine and this chicken stew comes from Ghana. Peanuts can be added to meat casseroles or steamed vegetables and they are highly nutritious as well. Ground peanuts are used to thicken this dish- peanut butter, which is easy to find, is used in the recipe. Alternatively, you can make your own peanut butter by roasting raw peanuts in their skins in the oven, rubbing the cooled, cooked nuts until the skins come off, and then placing the (skinless) peanuts in the blender and blending until a paste is formed. Very easy! Ground nut stew is one of those dishes that is simple yet so tasty. Everyone will wonder why they never thought of it themselves!

One whole chicken, cut into portions

One large onion

Two cloves garlic

One knob ginger root (or one teaspoon ginger powder)

Two tablespoons tomato purée

Four tablespoons smooth peanut butter

One teaspoon chilli flakes

Handful whole roasted peanuts

Vegetable oil

Salt and pepper

Flour for dusting

Method:

Heat around two tablespoons of the oil in a large, heavy bottomed pan over medium high heat. Meanwhile, dust the chicken is plain flour. Shake off excess flour and place the chicken pieces in the hot oil in a single layer- you may need to repeat this process a few times in order to brown all the chicken. Brown the chicken pieces- around four minutes per side.

While you are browning the chicken, peel and chop the onion finely. Fry the onion in the same pan as the chicken, until brown around the edges – 5 minutes.

Peel and chop the garlic cloves and ginger root (if using).

When the onion is cooked sufficiently, add the garlic and ginger - toss for twenty seconds. Add the chicken, tomato purée, chilli flakes salt and pepper. Add the peanut paste, stir to combine and two to three cups of water. Stir the sauce well to incorporate the peanut butter. Bring the mixture to the boil then reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer for around 45 minutes until the chicken falls away from the bone. The sauce should be thick and creamy. If the sauce is not sufficiently thick, uncover the pan and increase the heat to medium until enough liquid evaporates. Do not wander away as the sauce could easily burn. Stay close by and keep an eye on the pot!

Serve the groundnut stew with plain boiled rice and salad of your choice. Garnish the stew with the crushed peanuts. (To crush peanuts, place in a plastic bag and thwack the bag with a rolling pin until the nuts break up.)

Tip: why not try a vegetarian version of this dish as well? Instead of using chicken, why not just make the sauce and serve with steamed or roasted vegetables? Omit the chicken from the recipe, then purée the peanut-based sauce and pour over the cooked vegetables. Or you can use the same recipe with tofu instead of meat. Reduce the cooking time to 20-25 minutes only but follow exactly the same steps.

FILM ARTICLE: Top Ten Romances in Film. Copyright SvD.

This article first appeared on shadowlocked.com- a really excellent movie website. You can read the article below or click here to view it on shadowlocked.com (looks better with pictures of the films): TOP TEN ROMANCE MOVIES

Let’s talk about love …..

What constitutes a great romance? Is it boy gets girl or is it more about the journey and discovering that they’re actually falling for each other?  I guess anyone’s definition of love is simply that you choose him or her because of all the other people in your life, you’d rather be with that person and no one else. But to get to the point of wanting to be with that person is the journey that makes a film (and the quality of that journey is what gives us a FINE ROMANCE).

In early cinematic history, romance consisted of the passive, delicate female, all batting eyelids and sighing, waiting for her man to come to her. The female adjunct metamorphosed through the decades into a more in-control version and the supportive wallflower soon became empowered. As cinema and audiences developed a changing code of morals and ethics, so too did the newly confident heroine shed her inhibitions and become happy to strip off and take off literally, in the sexual realm. This modern take on portraying sex on screen probably killed off romance, which until then had been about subtlety and innuendo.

Romance used to be portrayed as that look, that smile, that square inch of bare neck barely visible under her polo neck sweater and that breast heaving under a taut silk blouse in ANTICIPATION of him.

Better yet, the great romantic films were elevated to legendary status by a sparkling script. Sadly these days, and like the fast food society we live in, we seem to now care less for the words and more for the gratuitous in your face action – as if recourse to a bit of IMAGINATION might actually kill. Similarly, characters nowadays seem to say very little to each other (or very little worth listening to) relegating the beauty of the English language to oblivion.

A script that shines, with effervescence and poignancy in equal measure, captures the human condition and the process of falling in love. There have to be BIG themes too – loss, sacrifice - running in tandem with rounded characters we can understand and empathise with.

Finally, without a great dose of chemistry between the leads, even a memorable script will just sound like someone reading a shopping list.

So here goes my choice of the TEN BEST ROMANCES – the real thing, the big cheeses in the love department.  The films that were memorable enough to replay like a melody over and over again whenever our thoughts turned to LOVE:

10.            BODY HEAT (1981,Lawrence Kasdan) (William Hurt, Kathleen Turner)

While some called this a tawdry remake of Double indemnity, this sultry, overheated film explores the scheming manipulator who uses sex to control her not-so-bright lover and ends up framing him for murder. Passion, sex and more passion and sex. Made in 1981 when audiences were just getting used to more risqué manoeuvres on screen, Kathleen Turner and William Hurt get top marks for CHEMISTRY. The film left us with the unforgettable scene where he breaks into her house as she watches because he is so hot he can’t help himself. The line between love and lust completely erased here but at least we get to feel something. And it’s all good.

9.            THE WAY WE WERE (1973, Sydney Pollack) (Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford)

OK, OK, the chemistry between Barbara and Robert was not great BUT these two gorgeous people did a terrific job of pretending to enjoy themselves. Cast as mismatched lovers whose relationship is doomed, audiences loved it because just as in real life, not everyone wins all the time. POIGNANCY in bucket loads about two people wanting different things but still capable of loving each other and at the end when they meet again. …WAAAAH! It could have been so different but it wasn’t. What they do have is memories…

8.            BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (1995, Clint Eastwood) (Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep)

Audiences took some convincing to see Clint play the sensitive type but boy, does he do a great job as actor and director in this colossal weepie. Playing a stranger in town, he soon has Meryl lapping it up and before you can say “Jack Rabbit”, she’s shed her inhibitions and forgot she’s in deepest Iowa where there’s an awful lot of corn and shattered dreams. Meryl and Clint have such amazing CHEMISTRY that gossip columnists were whispering of a real-life affair. We’ll never know but golly, we wept when she wept and almost passed out with grief when they went their separate ways. Better to have loved and lost than never….

7.            A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966, Claude Lelouch) (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée)

Bland and atmospheric with lots of glances, interminable silences, incomprehensible flashbacks, singing (!!!), tragic, furtive, sad, emotional, lots of cigarettes and real kisses…definitely a French film except that luckily they DO NOT commit suicide or murder each other in the end. Some would say that the film is too plodding and slow but as a genre it hits all the right buttons and its sheer style is unique. We get regret, sadness, a beautiful actress whose face casts shadows and rainbows and a memorable theme song. But her inability to forget her dead husband and guilt at sleeping with another man is universal enough to have everyone reaching for the tissues. In the end we get to feel something, although we’re not sure what because they’re all speaking French. And since this is a grown up film, we are left guessing what will happen next. And that’s exactly what happens in real life- no one really knows.

6.            AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997, James L. Brooks) (Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt)

SPARKLING SCRIPT with irrepressible Jack in his naughty-but-nice element. Impossible to outperform, there is no actor who could get away with such devilish insouciance concealing a heart of soft, vulnerable sensitivity. Helen Hunt is magnificent as the feisty waitress who puts him in his place. Both are missing that certain someone in their lives, and both end up needing each other – this is the ultimate feel good love story with a silly sub plot. But don’t let that detract from marvelling at how good an actor Jack really is. A romance for adults (preferably middle aged and looking for love).

5.            NOW VOYAGER (1942, Irving Rapper) (Bette Davis, Paul Henreid)

Ugly duckling learns to relax, pluck her eyebrows and get over her horrid mother and in the process falls madly in love with married man (who naturally she can’t have). Good old-fashioned morals with superb acting from Bette Davis who despite her unconventional beauty manages to carry off her role with elegance and aplomb. Another fine example of a  PERFECT SCRIPT that is memorable and touches all the big themes: maternal love, self love, forbidden love and romantic love. They don’t write scripts about women who forsake a-once–in-a-lifetime-love for the sake of a child anymore, yet despite its outdated theme it feels real and raw. And we are all delighted that Bette finds happiness of sorts that has eluded her for so long.

4.            BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961, Blake Edwards) (Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard)

It is probably no exaggeration that without Audrey Hepburn there would have been no point to his film. Besides playing a stir crazy prostitute, she brings pathos by the truckload to her wounded character with enough innocence to charm a cynic. The result is an irresistible, beautiful nymph to soften even the hardest heart. Hepburn possessed just the right balance of cheeky gamine and haughty detachment to carry it off. In the end, the film is a story about healing and redemption through love– all while standing in the rain with a sodden cat. If anything, the film started the trend of declarations of love under water. A touching piece that warms the heart.

3.            CASABLANCA

Few would argue that Bogart and Bergman look good together and they are helped by probably the BEST SCRIPT ever written. There are so many lines from Casablanca that we even recite in our sleep and this more than sixty years later! The combination of war, danger, espionage, the Germans, marriage, infidelity, intrigue, a series of perfectly slotted sub plots which also serve to gel the whole story neatly together and a blast from the past who comes to wreck Rick’s hard earned sanity, makes for the most seamless example of a script. It is impossible to imagine how the film or script could be improved. As a love story it deals with the HUGE themes of love lost and sacrifice (the biggest one being about sacrifice and that immortal line about a ‘hill of beans’).

2.            DR. ZHIVAGO (1965, David Lean) (Omar Sharif, Julie Christie)

The Russian epic to out do all other epics, we get to ogle Omar Sharif and the absolute beauty of Julie Christie. David Lean gives us a fine example of the director creating expanse and atmosphere with snow and red paint and daffodils and falling leaves in the same season. No matter, we swallow the abridged version of Russian history with relish but the real story is about a man who believes in his country and is forced to choose between his saintly wife and his mistress who just happens to be married to a murderer. The CHEMISTRY between Sharif and Christie is electric – she, all stoic tight lips and he of the soulful eyes. The film is worth watching just to hear her say “Oh Yuri, Yuri, Yuri…” A classic that should be watched on rainy Sunday afternoons again and again….

1.            BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945, David Lean) (Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard)

Celia Johnson carries this film as the housewife who finds love in the railway tearoom (of all places – imagine this happening with today’s surly commuters). Trevor Howard falls madly in love with her over milk and two sugars.. The simplicity of the setting and these two restrained, stiff upper lip characters, who have to try very very hard not to rip each other’s clothes off, makes for a delightfully chaste, yet poignant love story. A great example of ANTICIPATION that motors through the film keeping us wanting more and for them to finally please, just do it! As the philosopher Nietzsche famously said, thinking it is worse than doing it! A lesson on how to make a film on a shoestring and with a script pared down to a minimum but nonetheless with something unforgettable to say... And we are left clutching the tissues because she can never have him. How sad is that!!!!

This article first appeared on shadowlocked.com- a really excellent movie website: TOP TEN ROMANCE MOVIES

FILM ARTICLE: The Kiss. Copyright SvD.

(This article first appeared on shadowlocked.com, a really excellent movie website.)

In the Rodin Museum in Paris, there is a guided tour of Rodin’s most famous work The Kiss – and how he laboured for years to get the pose and symbiosis between the man and woman absolutely right. Rodin’s masterpiece remains one of the most recognisable and downright sexy pieces of art in the world today.

In cinema, the kiss is the culmination of longing, desire and a hot ante pasti to sex. Modern film depicts the leads grabbing each other and eating each other hungrily. But the kiss used to be much more than that; it once meant more than mere kissing.

The kiss used to be THE MOMENT –when we saw the two leads, finally at long last, give in to their absolute need to just hold each other for dear life and their lips met in a passionate but by today’s standards, chaste embrace. More often than not the dialogue was the most romantic and unforgettable that replayed over and over again in our heads.

Now Voyager: "Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars!"

Gone with the Wind: "You need to be kissed and often. And by someone who knows how!"

Casablanca – "Kiss me as if it were the last time"

Wow, hotdog – can you imagine if you were to kiss someone as if it were the last time? One has to wonder if modern audiences could even fathom the sheer breadth of that request.

The technique of old where language and WHAT the leads were saying to each other has been lost, I would argue, completely. Today’s main characters are portrayed as brazen, cynical and blasé about most things, and instead of vulnerability we get moral insensibility, so how can something like a kiss mean very much?

I watched The Notebook over and over again and I wondered where the intelligent stuff had gone. I found it laughable when he said that he wrote ‘365 letters’. He wrote her ‘every day for a year.’ Thanks for enlightening us on the length of a year.

What if he had said instead: “I can’t believe you just disappeared. Left. Forgot about me. Us. There was never a day that I didn’t think of you. And what we lost.’

Somehow modern day romance is puerile and frankly, forgettable.  The stuff we really remember in film (and that’s why we got the movies to be moved, inspired, entertained but mostly removed from our hum drum lives) is the moment when he just gives in: he looks at her, she looks at him and there is a sudden realisation that mere words cannot express what is running thorough their minds. And the KISS is everything. Because that’s when the barrier, the sandpit, the dyke, whatever you want to call it, is broached, and wham, real intimacy begins. The kiss, in a sense, is an act of honesty.

Hollywood often mistakes this silent complicity between a man and woman who are ultimately hot for each other, and instead of language, gives us the lunge. There is no other way to describe modern day kissing. Like fast food, it seems to be something that people need to do fast as if in a great hurry. Are they in such a rush to be somewhere else?

The truth is we wait the whole darn film for some sign that they’re going to get together. And when they do is it either the anticlimax of our expectations or something extraordinary. Clint and Meryl in Bridges of Madison County – now that was some ‘meeting of the minds’! All the copulation was done off screen and what we got was one of the best lingering, long romantic moments with the kiss that spoke many, many words. Mind you there was a lot of background dialogue in the song playing which was highly evocative but Client and Meryl clearly had all the time in the world to explore and savour that first kiss.

Contrast that moment with say, Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity and the whole; ‘wow factor’ of emotion just begins to seem tawdry.

And that is essentially the problem with romance in film these days. Men and women on screen seem to say little and emote in action not in words. Why can’t the kiss be the best moment of the film like it used to be? Now it s the inevitable par for the course moment but we don’t feel anything. No one seems to get lost in each other anymore.

And instead of kissing we get that ridiculous simulated sex. Now honestly – sex is pretty dramatic stuff and best-done behind closed doors. To watch two people simulating sex is a bit like drinking a skinny latte in the North Pole. It's a barely there moment without much sustenance. One has to ask – what’s the point?

Consider the sexiest moment on screen – Rhett Butler grabs Scarlet in his arms and carries her up the sprawling staircase. Cut to the next morning as she lays contentedly in his arms. Did we  need to see anything?

Real romance, sex, and lust, in fact the whole nine yards, is in the kiss. It is the longed-for silent moment where speaking just doesn’t seem to mean as much as the meeting of two lips and the locking of two souls – it is a prelude. The real thing because face it, we don’t lock lips with strangers on the train or the bus. But it’s the one thing that we dream of doing with the person we fancy the pants off.

And please, can we have real kissing!!!! THE TYPE WHERE HIS LIPS AND HER LIPS ARE BANG ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. None of this half nibbling of the nose or upper lip. Golly, where did this excuse for a smooch come from? If we want the kiss to be big and eloquent and orgasmic without the carnal knowledge (just yet), it has got to be HUGE in scale – sultry, desperate, life affirming, breathless to the point that they couldn’t bear to stop but will have to (or they’ll both pass out). Close your eyes and fantasise about the person you would most like to kiss and imagine WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT, the blink-or-you’d-miss-it smooch would be!

Longing is exactly that – something that should take a long time. The kiss is the big moment in the film, the entrée as it were, not the side order. It’s the unspoken word of love.

Copyright Samantha van Dalen. This article first appeared on shadowlocked.com - a really excellent movie website.

Photo and Painting Copyright SvD.

Autumn rain.

It feels like the Autumn rains have arrived along with the first frost. The pink and white horse chestnut trees are losing their leaves but those of the maple, beech and oak are still a vibrant green and intact on the tree.

The British weather is unique on the world- wet, damp, grey but with the occasional bright and heavenly day. We speak endlessly about the weather because it changes every five minutes. Only the British have mastered the concept of layers which we peel off as the temperature rises throughout the day.

While our Continental neighbours moan about the lack of light in Britain, why not look at it from a different perspective? The British weather forces introspection and imagination. Could Emily Bronte have written Wuthering Heights otherwise?

Magical tree.

I'm very fortunate to be able to take long walks every day in ancient woods with my trusty hound. I lose myself on these walks and use them as my meditation.

Even more wonderful are the trees I come across- many have never been pollarded or pruned and have been left to grow as they should in their natural form.

Here's a beech from this morning's walk - majestic and almost protective.

Photo Copyright SvD.