Walks of witness, steps free of shame

Placard protesting against the homophobic laws of the
Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, who, in true
Freudian style, has ‘anal’ as part of his name

Last Friday was Whit Friday – a day that means little throughout most of the UK but which, in parts of the North West of England, has great cultural significance.

In the morning, members of local Christian churches march through their town in a walk of witness, usually with banners for each church (think a religious version of trade union banners) and sometimes with a brass band from, say, a local school.

In the afternoon – in Mossley at least – there’d be games at the local football ground. In the evening, there’d be the band contests, where brass bands would travel from town to town, à la Brassed Off, competing in each contest before travelling to the next one.

For eight years, when my family lived in the Tameside region, I would have the day off school. I’d march with my father’s church, enjoy the games and then hang around outside the church itself while the bands marched in and out of St Joseph’s school yard to perform.

Eight years was the longest we spent anywhere when I was growing up: the sound of brass bands is woven into my being.

Yours Truly

My last Whit walk was 40 years years ago on Friday 8 June, 1979.

This year, on 6 June, I took part in what was, in many ways, another walk of witness and my first such one: London Pride.

I’d thought about going to Pride before – only as a member of the crowd, mind – but then somehow just never got around to it.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that I was afraid of being outed to the only two people I was in contact with whom I wasn’t out – my parents. My father had, back in those Mossley days, carefully nurtured an awareness in me that people who knew him would see me doing things and report.

Trafalgar Square

It happened at least once that I can specifically remember now, about something ridiculously innocuous, but it was an idea that lingered. I don’t think that such things leave you easily, even if you cease to be consciously aware of them.

I never told Mother and Dad that I was bisexual: by the time I’d come out to myself, I wondered what the point would be: wouldn’t it just risk seriously upsetting them, given their attitudes toward sexuality – and sin?

A few days before this year’s Pride, a work email newsletter arrived in my inbox, announcing that there were spare places with our organisation’s contingent for the parade itself. I took the opportunity. It seemed an apt moment too, as I work through some of the things that have risen to the surface in the tumult of dealing with both parents’ deaths since 2017, plus my own cancer diagnosis last year.

The day of Pride, I got to Portland Place in good time, but realising that, in olive linen trousers, walking shoes and a branded UNISON t-shirt, I was woefully underdressed. So I picked up a little rainbow clip-on bow tie. I was still underdressed, but not quite as much so.

Steampunky Gothy greetings

The atmosphere was almost overwhelming. As an old friend noted to me later on Facebook, you feel surrounded by warmth and good feelings. I have never experienced anything like it. It was extraordinary to have people reach out from the massive crowd (an estimated 1.5 million on the streets of London) to high five as they wished you the best.

There was plenty of outré behaviour and attire – and I like that: I adore the transgressive nature of drag, for instance.

And off course, it was less than a week into my One Million Steps Challenge, so perfectly suited.

Perfectly suited too, for being not simply a utilitarian walk.

Some ask why Pride is needed these days. Well, when you hear and read of rising homophobic and transphobic attacks, you realise why.

When you read of the protests against the No Outsiders programme being taught in Birmingham schools, you understand why Pride is necessary.

Indeed, just today, it’s been reported that the government has been accused of being “too slow” to tackle the issue – and support the school: accused by the woman tasked with tackling extremism.

‘God is love’

But now, it seems that the protests by some Muslim parents, on the grounds of their religious beliefs, against teaching children that all people are equal, are encouraging others.

According to this report, a group called Catholic Family Voice has been set up near Glasgow by a woman who describes herself as “excited” by what’s been happening in Birmingham. Another woman has been individually leafleting schools on the issue, ”aiming to disrupt, essentially,” while the founder of The Values Foundation makes it clear that she doesn’t ‘value’ equality.

“There’s no way that people of faith will teach it’s OK to be gay,” she said. “They won’t because the Bible tells us it isn’t OK to be gay.”

Yes. And the Bible tells us that we should do an awful lot of things that these people would not remotely suggest were appropriate these days.

It’s also worth noting at this juncture, that plenty of people of faith have no problem with the spectrum of sexuality, just as plenty of people of faith acknowledge that evolution is real.

But that’s as maybe. The point here is simple: it might seem that LGBT+ people have equality – in law, at least. But while they continue to be attacked, simply for being who they are and loving who they love, then the struggle is far from over.

I‘ll go with this

In many ways, in terms of a practical, day-to-day level, it’s not been particularly difficult for me: despite being out to people in my daily life, I’ve been in a relationship with a straight, male Other Half for 30 years (he knew before I recognised it myself), so people comfortably make assumptions and frankly, I’ve no interest in making my sexuality the subject of every first conversation with someone.

But almost four decades to the day since I last took a walk of witness – and now, not because I had no choice, but because I wanted to – I walked again.

In times like these, with the rise of the far-right revealing again the attitudes that gave rise to the pink triangle – the symbol stitched onto the concentration camp uniforms of LGBT+ inmates in Nazi Germany – witness is vital.

This year is also the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, with all that began. Our history is important.

So too is showing solidarity with those still being persecuted and even being killed: four LGBT refugees from Syria had finally arrived in the UK a couple of days before Pride. Finally, they could experience what it means to be out.

And it is also vital to say, as MP Angela Eagle recently did in a speech about the Birmingham schools protests: “We aren’t getting back in the closet”.

The shock of the modern

Wheatfield and Cypresses; van Gogh

Art is addictive. After nine months in which I’ve probably visited more galleries and exhibitions than in any comparable period in my life, I now want the occasional dose.

On Friday evening, with three and a half hours between the end of my working day and the beginning of the play I had a ticket for that evening, I headed down to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square for a top up.

It’s huge gallery; so labyrinthine that a map is vital. The first time I visited was right at the beginning of the 1980s.

I was studying for an art ‘A’ level at the time, and I made a point of going to see Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, which had already become my favourite painting after studying it in class. Painted in 1434, the detail staggered me, together with the ‘joke’ of the artist reflecting himself in the mirror on the wall behind the couple.

It wasn’t that I only liked old pictures – I loved the sheer photographic gloss and perfection of photorealisim and hyperrealism – so for me, that picture was a 15th-century example of something as close to that as it was possible to be.

Sunflowers; van Gogh

Amazingly, there were so few visitors that day that I could actually get really close to it – close enough to marvel at the detail.

But elsewhere, there was a revelatory moment lying in wait. The Impressionists at their most chocolate boxy were always going to delight me, but what really took my breath away was van Gogh’s Sunflowers from 1888.

I didn’t like modern art. I simply couldn’t see – couldn’t ‘get’ – anything that was beyond the clearly and obviously figurative.

It’s probably hardly surprising then, that while I could draw impeccably, I had the devil’s own job of being able to take a drawing an develop it beyond the obvious and photographic.

And I’d thought little of the likes of van Gogh. But that day, I suddenly got a least a little bit of the sense of the texture and the colour.

I’ve loved the artist’s work since.

A few years ago, I did an Open University humanities foundation course. One of the sections concerned art, and included a documentary about a Jackson Pollock painting.

Girl on a Divan; Morisot

It used computers to strip away each layer of pain, illustrating that there was a balance to the work – that it wasn’t just random drizzles, and that each layer added something without which the final piece would not work.

It was a step forward in ‘getting’ modern art – at least the non-figurative variety.

Then, this summer, something struck me.

Memory had long suggested that we didn’t really study any modern art at school. But memory had been playing tricks.

Because I started to recall that, however such it was that I had forgotten that part of the course, the reality was that I had studied the Fauves – which presumably means Matisse. I remembered suddenly that I knew the word and had known it for decades, because and I had first heard it at school.

How extraordinary the human mind is.

I’m currently reading Matisse: The Life by Hilary Spurling – not least because that, when he gained the burst of energy or inspiration that, in effect, led to the creation of Fauvism, he was in Collioure.

Bathers at Asinères; Seurat

Looking at reproductions of some of the paintings – in particular, at Open Window, Collioure from 1905, and it was with a dawning of what he had been doing. Because now I saw the light and recognised it.

And then I started to see colour as I hadn’t before – to look at it for its own sake, if you will.

Maybe that’s the key: Like Matisse himself, in a way, I needed the revelation of the south.

Anyway, with the time to spend on Friday evening, I headed to the gallery, armed with the knowledge, gained from a search of the website, that it has one Matisse – Portrait of Greta Moll, which was painted in 1908.

However, in my enthusiasm, I’d missed the little link for ‘key facts’, which also revealed that it is “not on display”, and therefore spent some time trailing from room to room, double checking whether I’d somehow missed it.

Still Life with Mangoes; Gauguin

However, it was never intended as a visit for just a single picture, but one in which to return to the most modern works on display.

Speeding past the Canalettos and the Hogarths, I found myself in a large room with the Turners – something else I’d not given much consideration to in the past.

This time, I stopped and looked. And started to wonder why on Earth I’d always preferred Constable. You can see why the likes of Matisse felt they owned something to the former: they don’t appear to have found anything from the latter.

And then the Monets and the Manets. I’d had a substantial (if brief) dose of Manet at Easter, so appreciated them differently, and there was also a Berthe Morisot, Girl on a Divan, from 1885.

Hillside in Provence; Cézanne

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, dated 1884, is one of the gallery’s most famous canvases.

It wasn’t actually a pointillist painting, since the artist hadn’t created that style when he painted this, but he did incorporate some dots into the picture.

I’d seen it previously, but never realised just what a luminous quality it has.

Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Mangoes from 1891-96 was seemed to radiate with the same lessons about colour that I’m learning from Spurling’s book.

Of the Cézannes on display, Hillside in Provence (1890-92) is beautiful in it’s light and colour.

And again, looking at it anew, I could start to appreciate the breaking down of the painting style and the capturing of something different from the merely ‘photographic’.

Les Grandes Baigneuses (1894-1905) is a very different canvas, with the artist setting out to reinterpret he sort of nude in landscape that had been painted by Titian and many more.

Les Grandes Baigneuses; Cézanne

The gallery had acquired in 1964, but I don’t remember seeing it before, and it’s so striking – in terms of colour and composition: look how the eye is drawn.

You can also quite clearly see the link to Matisse here, in both the simple way in which the figures are conveyed and the use of colour.

And then there were the van Goghs – and what turned out to be two very special treats.

First, Two Crabs (1889) is on loan from a private collection – exactly the sort of reason to visit nearby galleries on a regular basis so that you catch such gems.

The colour is sumptuous, while the varied brush strokes used to convey the textures are fascinating.

And then, A Wheatfield with Cypresses from 1889.

Two Crabs; van Gogh

Now this has been on display for a long time – and I’ve seen it more than once before. But somehow, on Friday, the colours seemed to take on a new intensity and vibrance.

Sometimes, a painting is so famous that you possibly don’t even really see it in all its glory because you can’t see beyond its reputation.

And suddenly, this had a 'wow' factor about it, with its swirling, curvaceous quality, and its wonderful hues.

The moral of the story is that you can never stop learning or seeing anew.

There might also be a second moral – the chance to repeat the old saw that travel broadens the mind, not least when it comes to appreciating art.

The sound of Christmas

Bogart. Pencil sketch.

Everyone has memories that are linked to times of year; to occasions; to places. Christmas and New Year are hardly unique, but they’re always going to feature highly on any such personal list.

For Nigel Slater, many such memories are inextricably bound up with food – and that includes his festive ones. His memoir of his early life, Toast, is well worth reading.

But while I have memories of Christmases past, food has never been the main part of those – not least, I suspect, because of a strong memory of my mother, sister and me sitting around, waiting for my father to return from taking morning services before we could begin the big festive meal, the crackle of unspoken tension alive in the air.

And turkey was never a favourite meat anyway: bland and less than moist. My mother's stuffing balls – she never actually stuffed the bird – and the sausages were always welcome, perhaps especially when cold, and particularly when accompanying cold turkey sandwiches on Christmas night.

Ah yes: Christmas night in front of the telly, watching the late-night BBC2 classic movie after my sister had gone to bed.

Sometimes you don’t even need things to have been replicated often for them to be linked and lodged in your head.

The sandwiches – brown meat, well salted – were traditional, but I remember just one specific such film, and thus it has become a norm for those times.

It was The Big Sleep; 1946, Bogart and Bacall setting the screen alight with their chemistry. The plot a mystery, but who ever cared?

Films were a vital part of my life; welcome escapism. There would be Saturday evening westerns after Grandstand had finished; an event that made sure my first heroes were not pop stars, but the likes of Jimmy Stewart and, most of all, John Wayne.

But then came that Christmas night and, at something like 13 or 14, a sudden burst of growing up. Wayne became a thing of the past – Bogart, a Christmas Day birthday boy himself, usurping utterly more simplistic tastes.

It was not without ramifications. Destined (according to teachers and, therefore, parents alike) to be a graphic artist, pencils were turned to conveying this new, noir passion. It continued unabated and fed into my O level work.

But that wasn’t the only Christmas Day film that had a lasting influence.

Pick a Pocket or Two – or just skip lunch.

Around much the same time, the BBC screened Oliver! for the first time one Christmas afternoon.

I have no memory of the rest of the family sitting down to watch. They might have. They might not. But memory is an odd beast, and mine is of seeing it in a sort of vacuum of personal delight.

A few years earlier, there had been an attempt to have me learn to play the piano. My mother’s parents had given us one and, when I was considered old enough, one of my father’s church organists was given the task of teaching me.

It was tedious: he lacked any inspirational qualities and I lacked any interest.

By the time the attempt withered, I had learned little more than to recognise middle C on both page and instrument.

But from nowhere came the desire to play. I saved school lunch money for a week or so, pretending I’d eaten but going without, and bought the film score instead.

At home, perched on the long bench, padded, and covered in shining emerald green fabric, the lid raised as neglected ivories itched to be tinkled, I started picking out the tunes.

It drove everyone mad. After such a previous lack of enthusiasm, now I’d happily play away for hours. Not smoothly or flowingly; but I worked at it and learned some of the pieces.

And later, I bought more sheet music. Inevitably, more show scores, although I made attempts – slow and error-strewn – at Beethoven and Chopin.

Many years later, reviewing for the Morning Star, the National Youth Theatre staged Blitz!, another Lionel Bart show. The rest of the media, which never before bothered to review these ‘amateur’ productions, feigned interest – amazed that Bart was even still alive.

Could they have an interview? No, he was not a well man. But 12 months on, when the group staged Maggie May, National Youth Theatre artistic director Ed Wilson, to whom I had told the story of my pianistic endeavours, invited me to the announcement of the new season, and engineered a meeting with the man himself.

“Tell him the same story,” said Ed, “and you’ll have him eating out of your hands”.

It was the final interview Bart ever gave. And setting aside any cynical hackery, I stood transfixed, starstruck even, as, lost in own memories, he regaled me with stories of how, on the opening night of Maggie May, he’d attended the premiere with Judy Garland on his arm.

Judy Garland: oh my.

'I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.'

The Wizard of Oz was never a Christmas film for me, but it came to have a Christmas connotation. One of the earliest films I’d been taken to see at the cinema on a re-release, I’d been terrified by the witch.

At 12 or 13, I played the Munchkin mayor in a school production. Some six or seven years later, I was unexpectedly playing the witch in a production at the Grand Theatre, Lancaster.

I say “unexpectedly”, because there were plenty more senior actors around who could have expected to win the role, and anyway, I’d auditioned for Gloria, on the basis of a combination of age and singing voice.

But I’d been asked to read the witch during auditions for the part of Gilda, the good witch – and had had enough of a ball that I’d been given the part.

A week in December, with matinees – a week to remember, seeing small children slither up the backs of their seats at the front of the stage, scared, but unable to take their bloggling eyes off what was happening under the bright lights as I – as the witch – slowly descended the stairs over the pit and into the stalls.

Oh, such power!

Weeks after, I was with my mother in a shop in Lancaster when a small boy suddenly yelled: ‘It’s her! It’s the witch!’ And that was without the make-up.

But that’s not the only Judy Garland connection in my Christmas memory bank.

Years later, I was helping my mother decorate the house one Christmas Eve (it’s always a last-minute matter) and we had the television on to accompany us. It was Meet Me in St Louis.

My father, late home from a service or a meeting, came into the room, stopped and stared at the TV long and hard, eyes narrowed in intense concentration.

Yes Dad: it's Judy.

Eventually, he said: “It’s The Wizard of Oz.” Well, at least he’d recognised Judy.

But going back to those earlier Christmases, the bumper issue of the Radio Times would have been scoured several times over before any of the programmes aired, just to pick out what films I might hope to see and makes a note of them.

And this was in simpler times, remember, when there were only listings for three channels.

Films, films and more films: I was in love with the Golden Age of Hollywood. Later, the magazine would be plundered for my scrapbooks, carefully-snipped stills joining cast lists and comments of my own.

The Radio Times Christmas edition has continued to be a part of my personal festive season, though to be honest, there seems little more on that I want to watch than there was in the 1970s.

Yesterday, scouring it once again for something to watch on a grim, rain-sodden afternoon, I could find nothing.

Rainy entertainment for a rainy day.

But a thought occurred. On the shelf was a copy of the 60^th anniversary BluRay of Singin’ in the Rain. What could be better?

It’s easy to imagine that technological advancement takes us further and further away from the past. That, after all, is partly what this Gene Kelly classic is all about.

But fully restored and on a format that allows the full glory of the original design and cinematography to be enjoyed once more, it snapped into life.

Kelly himself, utterly brilliant – what a dancer; Debbie Reynolds in delightful girl-next-door-becomes-a-star mode and Donald O’Connor showing fabulous slapstick skills – oh, it was as much a joy as ever.

So that’s my Christmas rediscovered: old movies. Classic Hollywood. Glitz and glamour and escapism, and yes, a little sentiment too. Although I draw the line at the schmaltz assault of A Wonderful Life.

I could stand in front of a little bookshop in Lancaster, waiting for the bus home after school, and put names to all the faces on the covers of large studio histories, then linking them according to who had appeared with whom on film.

I never sat down and learned such things; they just stayed put once imbibed.

So what’s up next? Well, it just has to be the BluRay copy of The Wizard of Oz. It too has been on the shelf for some time. This is clearly the moment it’s been waiting for.

And now for some pork done Italian style

After a recent post about slow cooking, Bill King had mentioned a recipe for 12-hour pork. Although I'd been considering doing a flamande carbonade at the weekend to try to develop the lessons of the previous Sunday, Bill's was a comment that turned my mind.

Pork is notoriously difficult to cook - it's all too easy to end up with dry meat. And as such, it's not a meat that I cook very often. But I started looking and, in fairly short order, had returned to Elizabeth David's Italian Food.

And there was a recipe for pork loin, cooked in milk.

Now the are plenty of recipes online for pork cooked in milk, but most seem to involve for more meat than two people were going to require. But loin sounded sensible.

On Broadway Market, there were no rolled pieces of pork, so what I decided to do was to buy two smallish pieces of tenderloin instead and place them together, with Mrs D's suggested stuffing, before tying everything into something more closely resembling a roll.

The stuffing in question was a little flexible - I don't think Mrs D expected cooks to be utterly tied to a recipe anyway, but in this case she stipulated garlic, coriander seeds and marjoram or fennel.

Well, I didn't have any coriander seeds and I didn't have any marjoram, so I used fennel seeds and some dried oregano and dried thyme.

Then you dice an onion finely and brown it in plenty of butter - approximately 35g. When this is browning nicely, add about 35g of finely chopped prosciutto or Serrano and let that cook too.

By now, it's getting a bit crispy - and it smells divine. Take your roll of loin and brown this in the pan.

The weight of this was just under 0.7kg. According to the recipe, you need around 0.8 litres of whole milk for this amount of meat, but that rather relies on the pot you're using.

Anyway, bring the milk to the boil and, when it's reached that point and the pork has browned, pour it over to just cover the pork. See what I mean about the size of your cooking receptacle? Mine – a large sauté pan that just took the length of rolled tenderloin meant that I needed to rapidly boil more milk to cover the meat.

But once you've reached that point, the milk needs to simmer away until a skin forms over everything.

And then you leave it for a good hour while it continues to simmer away.

After that, scrape all the skin and the crackly bits down the sides of the pan and back into the general sauce.

Mrs David says that this is where the liquid can evaporate remarkably quickly, so you have to watch it. But she didn't have quite as much liquid as me, so I was in little danger of it boiling away completely.

The meat, which had held together well even with my very inexperienced string work, was very tender and tasty.

The sauce? Well, it's counterintuitively lumpy but tasty.

I served it was rice and some sautéed courgette on the side. (Should that be zucchini?)

The biggest problem with cooking like this is that I've never eaten such a dish – so you don't really know what you're aiming for and whether it works as it should. It was certainly interesting, though.

But before that, early in the afternoon, as the sun finally broke through the grey and gave us a touch of divine warmth, I finally tried something else that has been stewing around in our heads for almost two decades – something that I had once tried.

Many years ago - almost 20 - when The Other Half lived at Finsbury Park, he took me for a birthday treat one year to an Italian restaurant on Blackstock Road.

A greasy spoon by day, it would be transformed after dark. I think we went there twice: certainly I remember a power cut on one occasion, leaving us eating by candle light.

But we have also both remembered the zuppe verde that we had at least once.

It was a light broth, with assorted leaves in it.

Yet for all that I've hunted, I've never found a recipe. And, since I have been wedded to recipes, it has thus remained a memory.

But enough was enough. With the spring-like weather, it would make a perfect light lunch.

The morning had started with stock making, using the remains of Saturday's chicken. One of the jars of this thus went into a pan with about the same amount of water, two bay leaves and six peeled, roughly chopped cloves of garlic.

I let it simmer away for a very short while, before adding a few cored leaves of cavallo nero, some spinach and the few leaves that had been on top of the celery 8'd bought at the market.

After about four minutes, I tossed in some very loosely torn basil and gave it all another minute.

Checking the seasoning, it needed a good two pinches of salt, plus black pepper.

It was served garnished with a drizzle of virgin oil and a little sprinkle of fleur de sel.

Now memory is as notoriously unreliable as pork is difficult to cook. But while it might have borne little more than a passing resemblance to what we had eaten all those years ago, it was certainly tasty.

This, for someone so wedded to recipes books, was a really enjoyable success. And it'll certainly be on the menu again. Clearly two, there is an extent to which you can play around with what leaves you use, depending partly on what you have in. And indeed, I found myself wondering how it would work if you replaced the basil with mint, which is apparently a particularly popular herb in Rome.

There's food for thought.

In a stew about gravy

Some things are best forgotten; left well hidden in the attic of memory, buried away behind the other clutter.

But memories, no matter how deeply interred, have a habit of popping up unexpectedly and coming back to haunt you.

Slouched in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon, wind rattling the plane trees outside, i was delighting to the joys of Nigel Slater's Eating for England, when a brief section suddenly threw the words 'gravy granules' out from the page and directly at me.

From the tender comforts of nostalgia for custard creams and mint cracknel - the latter of which I hadn't hear of in years, the former of which the same book has had me wanting instantly - I found myself slapped across the face by the wet fish of embarrassing memory.

I have to admit that there was a time when the kitchen cupboard housed tubs of beef, chicken and vegetable gravy granules.

That was bad enough, but then more detail flooded through: memories of serving Birds Eye frozen chicken burgers (the breadcrumbed ones, not those with something like Rice Crispies over them).

I felt mortified at the thought. But at least it serves as an illustration of what a difference a decade or so can make.

Mr Slater has a lot to answer for. But he also provided me with the roots of an interesting challenge this weekend.

The first chapterette in the aforementioned book talks of stew - of the great English stew a creation of diced meat, diced vegetables, a jug of water and a bay leaf, all of which comes together as something that is, almost at best, bland.

He compares it, pithily, to the casserole traditions of France, Italy and Spain, with the addition of booze (in the first case, at least) and the use of various herbs and spices.

Returning to the attic of memory - but deliberately this time, and with care - I rooted around for memories of maternal stews.

She cooked a stew rarely and, when she did, it was on a Saturday for a late lunch: it would have some meat of other, together with assorted veg, pearl barley and liquid.

I remember nothing more specific - except the slices of bread that we mopped up with at the end.

As I've mentioned before, she didn't believe in onion - not in an atheistic way, of course, but I have never known her have one in the house, whether a cooking onion ordinaire, one of the red variety or even the milder shallot.

Her culinary belief system did seem to understand that onions were occasionally required, but that was achieved by rehydrating some Whitworths dried fragments in an old, enamelled tin mug and then popping it in the cooking pot.

Well a least that's how I remember things - and I'm not getting the ladder back out and going back into that attic right now to see if I can find more detail.

But all this set me to considering a stew for Sunday, instead of the pot roast I had been contemplating as a way of christening the Le Crueset oval casserole.

I wanted to cook without any specific recipe, but that didn't mean a lack of research before I stepped into the kitchen this afternoon.

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Food offered clues in a number of recipes for classic dishes that seemed a tad more authentic than most versions I'd seen before.

For instance, meat was usually caramelised in lard or dripping instead of the currently obligatory 'healthy' option of oil - Which? magazine actually once criticised a Rick Stein book for including dishes involving cream and butter.

And the cooking time was also often considerably longer than I'd usually seen: for instance, I'd never seen a recipe for a daube that saw it cooked for four hours at 120˚C. That was information that I stored for use.

I've also got poor - albeit gradually improving - understanding of cuts of meat. More research suggested that for such a dish, I should use blade (or chuck, as it's also) known. Sure enough, Matthew had some.

It was beautiful meat, delightfully marbled (see picture at the top). This afternoon, I cut it into pieces (large bite size) and then diced onion, celery and carrot - the holy trinity of the mirepoix - plus parsnip.

The meat was browned in dripping first, then removed and replaced with the vegetables.

Once they were softened and a little golden, a tablespoon of plain flour was added, stirred in and allowed to cook through for. Minute, before I started deglazing with Wychwood's Scarecrow organic golden pale ale.

Once it had stopped thickening, I added a couple of springs of thyme, some seasoning and then the meat, topping up the liquid to just cover.

Then it went into the pre-heated over at 115˚C, since I was using a fan oven.

After tasting on 90 minutes, it was a rather bitter - but not in the way the beer would have been if you'd been drinking it out of a glass. I sprinkled in a little demerera, drizzled on a little Maggi sauce, stirred in a decent squirt of tomato purée and turned up the temperature about five degrees. An hour later, this seemed to have sweetened matters - a little.

Later still, something hit me: all the remaining bitterness had gone, leaving something with lovely layers of developing flavour, a general sweetness at the front and a hint of sourness later.

In the past, I've wondered whether I've done something wrong when I've tried meat 'n' beer dishes: they always seemed to have that bitterness. Is that really what the Flemish intended with the traditional carbonade?

The problem, I now realise, is that most modern recipes in the UK seem to regard 'long, slow cooking' as meaning two hours at the max. Presumably, British cooks are assumed to be somehow incapable of cooking anything for any longer – are we too impatient?

For the final 45 minute's cooking, I added dumplings, made of self-raising flour, mustard powder, shredded suet, seasoning, chopped parsley and a little chilled water.

Having left this dish for over four hours, it took a mere one bite to realise that there's a substantial difference when you seriously cook for longer.

I've been curious about slow cooking for some time, but had been struggling to find recipes that seemed to involve anything that was genuinely slow – apart from a Heston Blumenthal belly pork dish that took nine hours.

What a shame I hadn't bothered studying Luard's book earlier and in more detail! With the feeling that I've enjoyed a really tasty success today, I'm going to be studying the book further and actually trying some of the specific recipes - not the least the daube. No wonder my previous efforts have never tasted as I know, in my gut, the dish should!