Of mozzarella and men

It’s so foggy today, I can hardly see the end of my little cottage’s garden only a quarter of a mile away. I’m so used to the weather in London, which is famous for it sunshine. On an afternoon like today I’d be strolling around the olive groves, Sun dried tomato farms and feta orchards of my native Islington in the warm early spring Mediterranean sun of those sun-blessed southerly latitudes, now becoming as distant in my memory as they had once became distant in the rear view mirror of our freelander as we passed under the M25 and into terra incognita, the AA road atlas no longer showing roads and towns but merely the warning 'here be dragons' as we passed the large motorway sign which said, simply and ominously 'THE NORTH' . Once, I would wander the streets of North London, as free as the single white cloud in an unfeasibly blue tuscan sky, perhaps stopping to pick a lemon to squeeze over my calamari, freshly caught from the Thames, perhaps exchanging a friendly smile and a ‘Ciao!’ with the famously good natured and handsome youth of inner city London. I’m so used to all that locally produced food living in London that I just can’t get used to eating such strange and foreign cuisine as beans on toast and bacon sandwiches that they eat up here in the north. I’ve tried to adapt some northern dishes to the more sophisticated southern palate, for example cuisses de grenouille, instead of toad, in the hole or steak and Nuits-Saint-Georges, instead of ale, pie, but it’s just not the same as the cucina italiana d'Islingtonia that mama used to make . Hoping to recapture those days of the good life in London I bought a mozarella tree recently from a stall in the farmers market, which I thought would do well on my sunny kitchen window. I have to say though that for a farmhouse it's jolly hard to grow anything in this place and my investment in self sufficiency has yet to produce a single morceau of cheese. 'I think that man sold you a lemon, mummy', said Tilly, finding me one day wistfully regarding my cheeseplant and it’s resolute, and frankly very northern and stubborn, failure to fruit. I could not help myself from wondering for a brief moment if I too were destined to live unblossoming on some northern window ledge, untouched by the hand of man, any man, growing old knitting, blogging and reading Wife in the North whilst struggling to drink in any weak ray of light that the watery northern sun of a social life consisting entirely of other mothers who only speak Viking and wear horns on their head could provide. I wanted to tell Tilly the truth, that lemon bushes had completely different leaves, and that I feared no harvest would be gathered this dark year, in this cold place, but instead I simply wept a single tear for the life I’d left behind, a tear of pure chardonnay, Côtes du Hampstead Heath 1993. That was a good year, sigh...