Loathing lieder

 

All of us have things in life which we don’t like. Working’s a good one; most of us do it because we have to, rather than loving our job or profession. Exercise is another. Really, is there anyone who actually likes it rather than feels the need to do it? Do all those sweaty, flushed people go to the gym or for long runs because it’s the peak of their week or because it’s exercise or die!

But there are some things which go beyond dislike into the realm of hatred and loathing. Take custard, for instance, the slimy sweetness of it and of its first cousin, crème patisserie which goes under the fruit in a tart. My food loathing is various. Up there near the top are mangoes; I can’t even bear to smell them let alone eat them. Or eggplant – tasteless mush with a bitter flavour, or humous or tahini, equally bitter. Along with most people I loathe the skin which forms on hot milk. This hatred began in my pre-school days when my brother and I attended the early 1950s equivalent of kindie. It was run by Matron – really, she was called Matron – who fed us inter alia cocoa which always had scum on the top. I developed many more food loathings as I grew. Cold cooked veg was one, probably because of one occasion when I refused to eat my string beans and my mother made me stay at the table until I did, when they were cold, soggy and congealed.

I’m not sure where I picked up my loathing of tomatoes with eggs or for poached eggs or soft-boiled eggs or fried eggs cooked by someone else. I also loathe seafood, not just because I’m Jewish and seafood other than fish is forbidden but just because they’re awful – to look at or to eat.

My mother, bless her, was not an enthusiastic cook and my father had an extremely limited range of foods he would eat. There was a suite of maybe 10 meals which rotated, accompanied by a very restricted list of veg: potatoes, onions, carrots, occasional cabbage, peas and the aforementioned beans were more or less it, except for exotic vegetables like parsnips and turnips which were only used to make soup. Salads were iceberg lettuce, cucumber, celery and tomatoes. The absolute pits in my teenage lexicon of food loathing were twofold: my mother’s fish soup (made by boiling up fish in milk – aargh!) and my grandmother’s kasha, cooked buckwheat which stank so badly it forced me to the garden. Until I met my spouse, I had never eaten a mushroom or a capsicum. I’ve adapted to mushrooms but capsicums don’t like me much as I don’t like them; not loathing precisely but serious avoidance.

Another loathsome activity in our house was the process of making chicken soup. It began, naturally enough, with the raw chickens but in those days kosher chickens were absolutely dirty, still half covered with feathers and feather stumps. So job number one was lighting a candle, letting wax drip onto the draining board near the sink and sticking on the candle. The chicken carcass was then waved over the candle flame until the feathers were seared off and then the base bits were plucked. Next task was excavating the innards of the fowl where all sorts of disgusting things were found. Boiling water was used at this stage. Finally chicken shears were used to cut up the bird and it was put into a big chicken-cooking-pot, covered with cold water which was brought to the boil and skimmed. When relatively clear, parsnips, turnips, tomato, carrot, onion, parsley and celery were put in and the soup simmered for hours. When judged to be cooked, the chicken pieces were removed and the veg pressed through a sieve, The boiled chicken was so absolutely flavourless that only one uncle in our extended family would eat it, but the soup … ambrosial!

Moving away from food (as I wish I did more often) I have developed a loathing for lieder, mournful-sounding German language songs in the classical repertoire often delivered by very low-voiced chaps or mezzo sopranos. The genre developed principally through the efforts of Franz Schubert who wrote 600 of them including two well-known cycles: Die Winterreise (The Winter’s Journey) and Die Schöne Müllerin (The Miller’s Lovely Daughter) but the pits, the absolutely most awful of the genre, are Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs; to these I can only say Goodbye and Good Riddance. I also loathe counter-tenors; I think they’re creepy and now that women are allowed to sing in pubic there’s surely no need for them at all! I used to loathe any and all opera but over the decades I’ve come to love Baroque and other early opera, and I can tolerate most others; I reserve loathing just for most modern operas. The problem with loathing certain types of music is that I listen to classical music all day and part of the night. In my lovely upstairs quarters, I have stereophonic sound: two radios, each in different rooms. If lieder come on, or some modern opera, I’m forced to switch channels to ABC News Radio which finds me occasionally listening to the AFL – remarkably tolerable.

Other loathsome things include horror movies, my grandson’s choice of music, watching films with any combination of grandchildren who talk all the way through, being tickled and the back view of almost all women who show that they evidently do not possess mirrors.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Noel Coward writing to T.E. Lawrence in the RAF: “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338)”.

And of course: “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”