Well, That's a Fail

I'm talking about NaNoWriMo because let's face it if I've only managed about 6,000 words by now the hope of reaching 50,000 is long gone. I have reasons - of course, I have - and they are quite genuine but I knew much of this was going to come up before I started so I should have known better.  There were things I couldn't factor in as well - a funeral, weather which is scorching and drains the energy, medical 'stuff' for both of us (not serious but time consuming) and that's only part of it.


So I've faced reality which is that NaNoWriMo is a step too far this year. Instead I'm turning my mind to Christmas and trying to get myself organised earlier rather than later. These days I don't go crazy with Christmas decorations but I do like to do a little and this means it's time to pull the tree out of the shed and give it a hose down -  the amount of dust it accumulates even though it's sheathed in plastic always amazes me. Then I'll sort through the decorations and decide what has passed its useful time - and there's always something that has apparently spontaneously decided to crack or fall apart - and from there decide whether or not I need to invest in anything new.


We have a family tradition of putting up the tree and other decorations on the first weekend of December and then taking the whole lot down on the traditional date of January 6 and I think that's quite long enough for it to be up. There seems to be a tendency these days - largely due to commercial drivers - to extend the seasons for festivals of all kinds and I think that's a pity. One of our local supermarkets has taken to selling traditional Easter hot cross buns year round for example. This irritates me not so much because it's a break from tradition but because it takes away something that's unique to a particular time and something that could be looked forward to and savoured. If you have Easter buns all year there's nothing special about them, is there, so why bother?

It seems to me that this is all part of the way we live now where we seem to seek instant gratification and waiting for something is just too hard. Well, I refuse to give in to this because often anticipation is as much part of the delight as the actual event itself. This means I try to live by the principle of 'to everything there is a season' although others might find it odd and in line with that I'll keep to my traditional rituals and let each spark some pleasure because small joys are the things that make our lives worth living, don't you think.

We Will Remember Them

This handsome young man is my great uncle, Captain Horace Chamberlain King MC, and this photo was taken just before he joined up.

Horrie was born on 25 September, 1895, so he was 19 ½ when he joined up on 4 March, 1915. He was promoted rapidly becoming a sergeant on 27 July 2, 1915, second lieutenant on 14 March, 1916, lieutenant 21 August 1916 and finally captain on 23 March, 1917. He fought at Gallipolli and later in France where he was awarded the Military Cross on 2 September 1916 'for services rendered during recent fighting at Pozieres'. He was wounded on 2 November, 1917, and mentioned in despatches at the same time. He was wounded again in action on 7 April, 1918 and died as a result on 1 May, 1918.

A much loved youngest son and brother, his sisters, my grandmother and great aunt, mourned him all their lives.

Lest we forget.

Cultural Appropriation

After my successful return to yoghurt making I wanted to do more. With my Dairy-o kit came an instruction booklet - and since I had the foresight to cover it with plastic back in the day it's still pretty well intact. I had read it, of course, back when I got it but never gone beyond basic yoghurt making for some reason. There are other interesting recipes in it starting with how to make 'thickened yoghurt'. This is what we now know as Greek style yoghurt so it turns out I could have been making this for myself for years instead of waiting until it became a popular food item in the supermarket refrigerator shelves. Doh. Then there's how to make other cultures - buttermilk, sour cream, creme fraiche and cottage cheese - and buried among these is drained yoghurt cheese.

This last really caught my eye because I was recently watching an excerpt from The Feed (from public broadcaster SBS) in which the presenter, who is of Lebanese descent, was saying how she had come across this somewhere and how she felt there was some cultural appropriation taking place where someone had taken an item of Lebanese culture - labneh (a cheese made by draining yoghurt) - and misrepresented it by calling it something else (that is drained yoghurt cheese). I can understand how this might feel. Labneh is one of those traditional foods in Lebanese cooking that appears in many guises and I'm more than happy to acknowledge its place in that cuisine. I read a lot of cooking blogs and the further I looked into it the more often I found Lebanese folk claiming drained yoghurt cheese in the form of labneh as their culture's own.  They turned up writing critical comments about how their culture was being mistreated in some way which sometimes became quite heated - and I do understand.

But, the thing is drained yoghurt cheese is made all around the Mediterranean - it's found in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and Egypt and many other places. It's known by different names - it's labne in Egypt for example - and used in different ways in many places. There are even some slightly different versions of drained yoghurt in Asian and southern Europe cultures. Some might even view Icelandic skyr as in the same tradition although it does use rennet as part of its ingredients so maybe not.

This is where my dilemma arises because cultural appropriation is very tricky and as a writer it's something I have to be aware of. The trouble is when is it appropriation? In the case of drained yoghurt cheese I think I come down on the side of no, it's not cultural appropriation because it's a staple in many places and doesn't belong specifically to the Lebanon. I'd be interested to know what you think, too.

While I investigated a lot of things came up that I'm very unsure about. One thing about cultural appropriation seems to be that someone from a dominant culture lays claim to something which is unique to another culture and uses that for profit. So I can see why a fashion designer putting catwalk models in Native American war bonnets is definitely not on. Apart from anything else such headdresses are not merely meant as ornamentation and have other cultural significance. But another example given was of an incident where a manufacturer had used without permission paintings and designs by indigenous Australian artists on items like T-shirts and tea towels. To me this isn't simply appropriation - although it is in part - but more accurately it's outright theft of the artists' work. If someone makes something - a piece of art or written words or whatever - this belongs to them and they should be the one who profits from it. Just like movie and book piracy if you take and use what someone produces for your profit or to avoid paying for it without either the creator's consent or permission in my view you're a thief. Again I'd like to know what you think.